Making a WPF TabControl ignore Ctrl+Tab

Question

I'm writing an app that uses the "tabbed browsing" metaphor, with a TabControl the full size of the window, and other stuff inside the tabs. Sometimes those tabs will themselves contain other TabControls.

(Tabs inside tabs can be confusing, so I'll re-style the inner TabControl so it doesn't look like a TabControl. I'll probably style it to use ToggleButtons at the top instead of tabs.)

I want this UI to behave like you would expect the tabbed-browsing metaphor to work: Ctrl+Tab should always switch tabs on the outer TabControl (the one that looks like a TabControl), even if keyboard focus is inside the inner TabControl (which doesn't look like a TabControl, and therefore shouldn't be expected to respond to Ctrl+Tab). But, of course, the inner TabControl gets the key event first and handles it itself.

What's the best way to keep the inner TabControl from responding to the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab key events, so those events can bubble up to the outer TabControl?

Answer 1

The WPF TabControl appears to manage the keyboard navigation feature via the OnKeyDown method. I would suggest creating a custom control that inherits from the TabControl, and override the OnKeyDown method.

Answer 2

You can handle the PreviewKeyDown event on your inner TabControl and set e.Handled = true to prevent it from handling key events. You can then find the parent TabControl (perhaps recursively through ((TabControl)sender).Parent ) and change its SelectedIndex programmatically.

Wrapping that up in a custom control would keep it reasonably clean.