Tab Order

Maintaining tab order can be time-consuming on complex screens. Inserting a control between existing fields requires renumbering the controls that follow it. Wisej.NET provides design-time and runtime tools to automate this work.

Designer

At design time, use the "Tab Order" button in the designer toolbar to enter "tabbing mode". It will give you three options: Manual, Horizontal and Vertical.

Select Manual to enter tab-order mode, then click each control in the desired sequence. If you miss a control, restart the sequence to assign the correct order.

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

TabOrderManager Extender

You may want horizontal tab order in one container, vertical tab order in another, or no automatic renumbering. The TabOrderManager component allows you to do that at design time.

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

Change Programmatically

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 an existing instance already created at design time. This component exposes a number of methods that will help your code update the tabbing order.