winforms - contextMenuStrip - close on clicking away.

Question

Hi All,

I have a DGV with a ContextMenuStrip. The ContextMenuStrip's default behaviour is to auto-close - i.e. to close immediately on the user interacting with it. I've turned this off to allow multiple user interactions (which is what I want), however beyond that what I really need is for the context menu to subsequently close on the user clicking anywhere outside of itself.

The space in which the user clicks away might be on the form directly, or a child control (or a child of the child etc). And yet regardless, I am looking to neatly capture the 'click away' event, and thus close the ContextMenuStrip.

Any ideas would be v.gratefully received.

Tamim.

Answer 1

You could follow what these guys have done in this SO question. I'm not sure if this would cause a flicker in the ui, but it might allow you to do what you want to.

Answer 2

Just close it in the LostFocus event on the ContextMenuStrip.

Set the AutoClose property back to true and handle the Closing event. Cancel the close only if the CloseReason is equal to ItemClicked.

Answer 3

Generally speaking, I discourage non-standard behaviour of standard controls... so this is really borderline. I'd probably look for a way to refactor the UI to make it more intuitive for the user, who will expect a context menu to close itself after selecting one of the menu items.

In this situation, if you're modifying the properties of a row in the grid, for example, you could use a Properties (modal) dialog box that gets opened from the context menu; or, implement something like the Visual Studio Properties window, where it updates itself depending on the selection context. Both of these solutions are more flexible and will provide better feedback to the user than a simple context menu.