#310 – Give a Control Logical Focus

May 31, 2011 3 Comments

You can give a control the keyboard focus using the static Keyboard.Focus method.  If you want to instead give a control the logical focus, you can use the FocusManager.SetFocusedElement static method.  (In the System.Windows.Input namespace).

                // Give logical focus to txtFirst TextBox
                DependencyObject focusScope = FocusManager.GetFocusScope(txtFirst);
                FocusManager.SetFocusedElement(focusScope, txtFirst);

If you do this in an application with multiple windows and you set logical focus for a control in the inactive window, you’ll see that it does not get keyboard focus.  You can continue entering text in a control in the active window.  But when you switch back to the inactive window, you’ll see that the control does get keyboard focus.

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3 Responses to #310 – Give a Control Logical Focus

  1. Eljay says:
    October 6, 2011 at 1:14 pm

    How does that differ from…
    txtFirst.Focus();

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  2. Glenn says:
    May 18, 2014 at 10:36 pm

    That’s incorrect. FocusManager.SetFocusedElement does give keyboard focus, sometimes. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.input.focusmanager.setfocusedelement(v=vs.110).aspx: “and will attempt to give the element keyboard focus”. As far as I can tell, it’s impossible to reliably change the logical control of a focus scope without sometimes stealing keyboard focus too, which largely defeats the purpose of having them separate.

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