Forms losing focus

Apocolypse2005 · #1 (**permalink**) February 24th, 2009, 12:22 PM

I have created a dialog type form which i need to be the top most form and it musn't lose focus, so obviously (or not so . . ) i set the topmost property to true, but the form can still lose focus . . . any thoughts?

dparsons · #2 (**permalink**) February 24th, 2009, 02:01 PM

Well it depends on what you mean by 'focus'. Are you talking about a 'window' popping up in side of a browser window that contains your form that, when displayed, disables everything else on the page or are you asking how to spawn a new window and keep it as the top most window?

In the case of the former you can use a standard CSS Modal effect where the user clicks on something, a hidden div appears and overlays the entire page with a semi-transparent png thus making the form in the div the only thing that can be acted upon. You could also look into the ModalExtender control in the AJAX Toolkit.

In the case of the latter, this can be achieved with JavaScript but it is pretty annoying and I would recommed it.

hth.
-Doug

gbianchi · #3 (**permalink**) February 24th, 2009, 02:08 PM

Just to clarify, are you looking for that in web or in a form based enviroment???

(Doug, this is the vb2005, could be any case!)

Apocolypse2005 · #4 (**permalink**) February 25th, 2009, 06:14 AM

This is in vb2005, not web based!
I'm looking to make the form that pops up to be the top most form and can't be navigated away from until its closed.

gbianchi · #5 (**permalink**) February 25th, 2009, 06:58 AM

Ok. Did you search google?? there are a lot of examples around there...

try for example ".net form always on top"

This is not a trivial mather, since you have to catch windows events to make it work (and also, you could lost focus, there is no way that you can remain focus, unless, maybe with a crazy idea, that you built a transparent form under your form that catch the entire desktop, with bars and everything).

Apocolypse2005 · #6 (**permalink**) February 25th, 2009, 08:37 AM

It can be done easily, i think it is trivial.
For example, open up windows movie maker
Tools -> Options
Then try and click the main movie maker window, it doesn't let you unless you close the options dialog box.

Apocolypse2005 · #7 (**permalink**) March 2nd, 2009, 04:32 AM

Effectivily what i was trying to do was to make a dialog out of a form, so when i call the form to show instead of using form.show which gives standard results ii should of used form.showdialog(me) which gives the form all the properties of a dialog form such as; waiting till the user inputs data and the form is closed before carrying out the next line of code - which is not true when .show method is used because once it's shown the parent form goes to next line of code, and focus on that form cannot be lost to the parent form so achieving always on top.

So the code is:

Code:

Dim dialogForm As New Form1
dialogForm.showdialog(me)

Lupus81 · #8 (**permalink**) August 10th, 2009, 05:36 AM

Add some code on that forms.
Private Sub Form1_load(...)
Form1.Focus()
End Sub

Apocolypse2005 · #9 (**permalink**) August 20th, 2009, 08:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lupus81

Add some code on that forms.
Private Sub Form1_load(...)
Form1.Focus()
End Sub

No point the question has been answered, that wouldnt work though because it wouldn't stop the form that called that event carrying on processing the rest of the subs code, the thing with showdialog is that it haults the caller until an answer has been given or the dialog has been closed!

Need to download code?

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