Indicating a selected item in a listview

Question

I have a ListView control in .NET Winforms containing filenames from a directory. When first displaying the control, I populate the listview, then programmatically select the first item in the list thusly:

    if (lvwFiles.Items.Count > 0)
    {
        ListViewItem firstItem = lvwFiles.Items[0];
        firstItem.Selected = true;
    }

This works fine, except that the first item in the list should be visually highlighted (reverse-highlighted?) to indicate to the user that it's the one selected, as happens if the user then clicks one of the items.

It seems like a dumb question, but I've looked around on Stackoverflow and elsehwere and don't see an obvious answer. Is there an easy way to make this happen via setting a property or something similar?

Answer 1

Not sure if this works as I haven't run the program but can't you select the row you want (from lvwFile.Items) and set the Selected value to true. For example:

temp.Items(rowIndex).Selected

Answer 2

Register for the selectedIndexChanged event. Here you can perform whatever visual highlights you need on the selected items.

    void listView1_SelectedIndexChanged( object sender, EventArgs e )
    {
        foreach ( ListViewItem lvi in listView1.SelectedItems )
        {
            lvi.BackColor = Color.Black;
            lvi.ForeColor = Color.Chocolate;
        }
        // TODO: Reset the other items to normal.
    }

Answer 3

What you are doing should work fine.

After a little testing it looks like the listview's tabstop property must be set to true, and the listview has to have a tab index of 0.

Answer 4

Change the HideSelection property to false in the designer (or through code). Doing that will allow the selected item to show even when the control does not have focus.