Tab Order
Tab navigation concepts.
Last updated
Tab navigation concepts.
Last updated
Managing the tab order of complex screens can become very time consuming. If you add a control in the middle of a set of fields you have to renumber of the following fields. Do that for a form with 100+ fields and you'll appreciate what we have added to Wisej.
At design time use "Tab Order" button in the designer toolbar to enter "tabbing mode" It will give you three options: Manual, Horizontal and Vertical.
Press Manual and the designer enters the "tabbing mode" and now you have to hit every single control from the start to set the correct sequence. Miss one and you'll have to start again.
Press Horizontal or Vertical and Wisej.NET automatically renumbers all the tab indexes using an horizontal or vertical navigation algorithm and enter "tabbing mode".
Sometimes you may want to use an horizontal tabbing in a one container and a vertical tabbing in another or disable the renumbering altogether. The TabOrderManager component allows you to do that at design time.
Drop the TabOrderManager on the designer and all the container in the design surface will expose a new extender property named TabOrder allow you to set the order direction for each container.
The same design-time issue is present at runtime when the application adds or removes controls dynamically. In code you can go through the controls collection and assign new tab indexes. However, the assignment becomes more complicated when there are containers and nested containers.
In code you can create an instance of the TabOrderManager component or use a existing instance already created at design time. This component exposes a number of methods that will help your code update the tabbing order.
