Block Access mousewheel behavior in external ActiveX controls

Question

In an Access (2002 / 2003) data-bound form, a turn of the mousewheel moves to the next/previous record, even if the cursor is inside a multiline text field or a listbox. This is a major annoyance to users and cannot be turned off easily.

I recently discovered a DLL called MouseHook (http://www.lebans.com/mousewheelonoff.htm) which can effectively block this mousewheel behavior and replace it with more expected behavior.

However, when an external ActiveX control is added to an Access form, this module does nothing. For example, I have a form with a FlexGrid control on it, and it can contain a lot of rows. When a user tries to scroll in there using the mousewheel, Access again simply goes to another record instead, even with MouseHook DLL loaded.

Is there a solution like MouseHook DLL but which also works for external ActiveX controls? Or is the source code of the MouseHook DLL available so it can be modified to deal with controls like FlexGrid?

PS: I wanted to ask the author of MouseHook DLL, but he is currently "on a hiatus" until June 2009.

Answer 1

Not a direct answer to your question, but the way we deal with the mouse wheel movement is to prevent accidental changes of records after the user has started editing. When the user opens the form, the wheel moves the records willy-nilly as normal. As soon the user edits something on the field, and then moves the mouse wheel, the BeforeUpdate event fires, which causes our code to put up a prompt saying they must save the record first. We have a save button which the user must explicitly press to supress the warning in the BeforeUpdate event.

Answer 2

If you really have to alter the UI and change how the user expects the mouse wheel to work, I would actually recommend just disabling it rather than altering how it scrolls. While it's scrolling may seem odd to you, it is how the program works. What would you do if you had to read PDF's all day, and then one day one person decided that the way the mouse wheel scrolling worked wasn't good enough and changed to so it defaulted to huge jumps or horizontal or whatever. Yes, it may have been a better solution, however it is annoying to the user because it doesn't do what it is supposed to do.

Answer 3

Why are you using a flexgrid in Access? To me, this is a read flag that you likely are approaching the project with an Access-hostile point of view, since you seem to be choosing non-native controls to do things that are almost always much more easily accomplished with Access's native controls.

Answer 4

Hook the flexgrid, intercept the WM_MOUSEWHEEL message, ignore it and call your intended behaviour.