I´ve been working for some time on a good OSK solution for my WPF apps, that are running on a tablet. But it´s hard working with the OSK.exe and tabtip.exe, because of several bugs, strange behaviour and no standardized solution to this ordinary problem.
What I (probably) need is a custom textbox control, which inherits from System.Windows.Controls.TextBox, and overrides some methods.
The simple requirements for this textbox should be:
1. When a user clicks in a textfield, the tabtip.exe (or alike) keyboard should pop up at the bottom of the screen (default).
2. If the keyboard pops up on top of the textbox, the contentframe should scroll so that the textbox is visible.
3. When the textbox loses focus, the keyboard should close automatically, except if the user clicks on another textbox.
This seems like pretty standard behaviour right? Well I´ve looked a long time for solutions (there is no standard microsoft way which is kind of weird), and as said I´ve tried making my own but with no luck. For example, sometimes when I try to kill the process, it fails. When I click the close button in the upperright corner on the keyboard, like 5-6-7 times, it closes. The behaviour from PC to tablet is not consistent. The ScrollViewer.ScrollToVerticalOffset(x); sometimes doesent work on a tablet, and so on.
So does any of you know a good solution to this common problem?
Related
I have a Page in WPF which has a text box. This text box is set to be focused on load.
There is an application running in the background which takes a string value of a biometrics scan result and places it in that text box. This is a 3rd party application, and we have been told that it looks for a text box with a certain name, in an application with a certain name and if that text box is focused on, it will write that string in.
This works perfectly fine, but below is the problem I am having.
We have another piece of software which is a custom on screen keyboard. The text box can also be written into so the user can click a button to bring up this keyboard then start typing. However when this keyboard comes up, it seems to lose focus to my application and it doesnt come back again. For the lifecycle of our application running, the biometrics doesn't work because it doesn't see my application as the one currently in focus.
How do I force my application to come back in focus, but only when I want it to. I don't want it ALWAYS to be in focus and on the top, else the custom keyboard would never show.
I looked into Application.Activated Event with no joy, and even tried the following
public static extern bool SetForegroundWindow(IntPtr hWnd);
Getting a but stuck, does anyone have any advice?
Have you tried Activate() and Focus() methods?
This thread has a bunch of answers on topic Bring a window to the front in WPF
This particular one worked for me https://stackoverflow.com/a/7559766/305020
I am working on the touch screen application which is running on Windows XP Standard. With current hardware to invoke a right click user has to click and hold for couple of seconds, but this might interfere with other actions like holding a repeat button in the scrollviewer, so I have decide to disable a right click.
I would ideally wan't to disable a right click on the application level, but if it is not possible, disable right click on windows level would also work for me.
The OnPreviewMouseRightButtonDown/Up approach did not work for me.
There is a property Stylus.IsPressAndHoldEnabled on UIElement however. Set that to false to get rid of the press and hold right click behavior. I tested this on Windows 7 with .NET 4.0, but the property is available from .NET 3.0.
<RepeatButton Stylus.IsPressAndHoldEnabled="false" ... />
There is also a blogpost here that provides a code sample for a similar disabling of press and hold at window level. But with this in place, the PreviewTouchDown and TouchDown events will not be raised as soon as the finger touches the screen (which would be necessary for a RepeatButton I guess), only later. Read the 'Remarks' on this msdn page.
You can override the OnPreviewMouseRightButtonDown on the Window and set Handled to true. You also need to handle OnPreviewMouseRightButtonUp (thanks to Vitalij for pointing this out)
That should do the trick.
I like how MsgBox stops all further processing until it's clicked but I don't like how it pops that little msgbox in the middle of the screen. Is there a way to do something like a msgbox but keep it on my Form (which is always in view) so I can go ahead and click a button on the form instead of having to bring the little msgbox window on top of windows that may be covering it.
I use the msgbox to inform me that a certain situation has happened, which I manually fix and when I'm done I click the MsgBox to continue processing. It'd be nice to have this button right on the form.
which I then have bring to the front if there is a window covering it
That shouldn't happen, but can happen if you display the message box from a thread in your program. The window has the desktop as the parent and has no Z-order relationship with the windows in your user interface. And yes, can easily disappear behind the window of another app, including your own.
There's a MessageBoxOptions option that isn't exposed in Winforms, MB_TOPMOST, which ensures the window is top-most. You'd use it like this:
MessageBox.Show("text", "caption", MessageBoxButtons.OK,
MessageBoxIcon.Information, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button1,
(MessageBoxOptions)0x40000); // use MB_TOPMOST
But by far the best thing to do is to display the message box on your UI thread. Use Control.Invoke() to do so. That way the other windows of your app are disabled, no way for the user to not notice the box.
Still one problem with this, the user won't expect the box to show up since it is shown asynchronously from anything she does. Which means the box can easily get dismissed by accident when the user just happened to press the Enter or Space key. Or clicked at just the wrong spot. Nothing much you can do about that.
Centering the box in your main window is technically possible, but fugly to do. Check this answer.
Do you mean that the form shall exchange its contents with a message plus an OK button?
This would be similar to the way a text mode interface typically works.
You can make it happen by adding a disabled panel or UserControl with message and button topmost on the form and enable it when you wish to alert the user. However, I am puzzled how to implement the blocking behavior similar to MessageBox.Show() and Dialog.Show().
When designing a form I have the option of putting a close button at the bottom of the form. The form will also have a close form "x" button in the upper right corner of the window as provided by winforms.
Based on the principle of "There should be one and preferably only one obvious way to do it" I was thinking the close button should be removed because of the forms existing default functionality.
What have the rest of you found in your experience that works best for users or has been the standard for UI setup?
I have done a considerable amount of design work, and I can't say I have heard of the principle of, "There should be one way to do [some task]." In fact, I have heard (almost) the opposite: "There should always be one obvious way to do a task, but additional methods could be used to help different user types." An example of this is the ability to hit the "Save" button to save a document. But, you can also do "File > Save" and you can also hit Ctrl + S. Three ways to do the same task.
Also, if you're programming in a Windows environment (as it appears you are), you will automatically get multiple ways of closing a window. The [X], of course, Alt + F4 is typical, you can setup Ctrl + C, etc. I wouldn't particularly put a close button on the bottom of the form unless it flows with the form's input. For example, if you want to [Submit] or [Close] the form - does that make sense? Would it be better to [Submit] or [Cancel]? Think about what your users are doing and how they are using the form.
Here are some guidelines I follow:
If the form is an application (it was launched directly from Windows), it should probably not have a close button. Users expect to be able to close the application by clicking the X in the top-right corner.
If it is a dialog (it was launched from another window within your application) that simply displays information, it should probably have a close button and you can optionally leave the Windows close button as well.
If it is a dialog that allows the user to edit data it should have a Save or Apply button and a Cancel button but no Windows X. The reason is because it is ambiguous what it means. Should it save the data? Cancel it? Display a dialog asking them what they want to do?
In general I do agree that there should be only one way to do something. The reason is that a reasonable user will have to wonder if they do different things (even if they are named the same). Even if the user discovers they do similar things, they may wonder if they are subtly different.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule. For example, most users understand that the file menu, toolbar, and keyboard shortcuts of the same name all point to the same command.
I think that principle applies mostly to coding (and not for every language, think of Perl!), for UI's usually it's good to have different ways to do things... because it allows you to do things faster.
Think about any common operation like cut or paste, you can use the edit menu, the contextual menu, the keyboard shortcut or even the icons in the toolbar. Try to remove any of those ways of doing it in any application and you'll have hordes of users screaming to get it back.
So here the main principle is to not change what the user expects. Another remark: be consistent, though there might be different ways get access to the same functionality, all of them should work in the same way (I'd be very pissed of if copying with the keyboard shortcut did a different thing than copying with the right mouse button XD).
Is there a simple way to tell what triggered Click event of a Button apart from setting multiple flags in Mouse/Key Up/Down event handlers? I'm currently only interested in distinguishing mouse from everything else, but it would be nice to handle Stylus and other input types if possible. Do I have to create my own button control to achieve this?
Edit: To clarify why I care: in this particular case I'm trying to implement "next" and "previous" buttons for a sort of picture viewer. Pictures in question may be of different size and buttons' positions will change (so they are always centered below picture). It's quite annoying to follow such buttons with mouse if you need to scroll through several pictures, so I want to keep mouse position constant relative to clicked button, but only if it was clicked by mouse, not keyboard.
Edit2: It does not matter whether the buttons are on top or down at the bottom, since the center can change anyway. "Picture viewer" here is just an abstraction and in this particular case it's important for me that top left corner of the picture retains it's position, but it's out of the scope of the question to go in details. Scaling the picture is not so trivial in this sort of application as well, so I do want to know the answer to the question I asked not going into UI implementation discussion.
if (InputManager.Current.MostRecentInputDevice is KeyboardDevice)
You should instead handle specifically the MouseXXX, StylusXXx, and KeyboardXXX events.
Could you elaborate on why you would care?
Having written many custom controls myself over the years, I cannot recall one instance where I cared how a click event was triggered. (Except for that pre VB6 control lifecycle glitch that fired the got focus-click-lost focus in a different order depending on whether you clicked a button, used an accelerator key, or pressed ENTER as the default).
Personally I find it annoying when people place buttons at the bottom of Windows forms and web pages. Read some of the literature on UI and you will find that most people don't even get that far if they don't find something interesting on the page/form. I like to be able to click next as soon as I know the content is of no interest to me, so keep the nav buttons prominent at the top.
I would put the prev/next at the top of the picture where you can control their position. Dancing those buttons around goes against most opinions on UI consistency. Further creating a different experience for a mouse user versus a keyboard user also goes against most current wisdom on good UI design.
The alternative is to choose a constant max size a picture can obtain on the UI and if it exceeds that scale to fit, otherwise allow it to change freely within a frame. This keeps your buttons at the same place if you absolutely must have them on the bottom.
You could create an enumeration with the different devices, have a global property that you set every time the mouse/keyboard/etc. is initiated, and just refer to this when needed.