Taming your WinForms Grid–Special Key Behaviors

Yes, I know, I am the reporting guy. I’ll have you know, however, that I was also a DevExpress customer starting all the way back in 2006! I recently looked into our fancy issue tracking application and saw an entry on the 3rd of July 2006. With that in mind I want to come out an categorically state that I am a WinForms fan boi (and have been for quite some time). With that in mind, I recently got an email asking something like this:

I want the grid to go to the column directly below the current when I hit enter. I also want the text to be edit-ready as well. How do I do this?

So I dug in. Turns out it isn’t too hard! The first thing is to handle the KeyUp event on the GridView:

private void gridViewMain_KeyUp(object sender, KeyEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.KeyCode == Keys.Enter)
    {
        var handle = gridViewMain.FocusedRowHandle;
        if (handle > -1)
        {
            var col = gridViewMain.FocusedColumn;
            gridViewMain.FocusedRowHandle = ++handle % gridViewMain.RowCount;
            gridViewMain.FocusedColumn = col;
            gridViewMain.ShowEditor();
        }
    }
}

The gist:

1. Get the focused row along with the currently focused column and save them
2. Add one to the row handle and make this the the currently focused row (the % stuff makes it wrap to the top once it reaches the bottom)
3. Set the focused column to the one we stored
4. Show the editor.

Done! Here is what it looks like:

The skip you see in the animation is due to the looping and not the code

As always, if there are any comments and/or questions, feel free to get a hold of me!

Seth Juarez
Email: sethj@devexpress.com
Twitter: @SethJuarez

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