Tab Order

Tab navigation concepts.

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 the following fields. Do that for a form with 100+ fields and you'll appreciate what we have added to Wisej.NET.

Designer

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 "tabbing mode" - you must click every single control from the start to set the correct sequence. Miss one and you'll have to start again.

Manual tab order mode

Press Horizontal or Vertical and Wisej.NET automatically renumbers all the tab indexes using a horizontal or vertical navigation algorithm and enters "tabbing mode".

Horizontal/Vertical tab order mode

TabOrderManager Extender

Sometimes you may want to use horizontal tabbing in one container and vertical tabbing in another, or disable renumbering altogether. The Wisej.NET TabOrderManager component allows you to do that at design time.

Drop the TabOrderManager on the designer and all containers in the design surface will expose a new extender property named TabOrder allowing you to set the order direction for each container.

Change Programmatically

The same design-time issue is present at runtime when the Wisej.NET 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 Wisej.NET TabOrderManager component or use an existing instance already created at design time. This component exposes a number of methods that will help your code update the tabbing order.