Question

I have a simple TextBox that is empty in the beginning. I have a simple event, _TextChanged, to know when the user changed anything in that TextBox. However, the event fires if I do anything with it myself from within code. Like setting textbox.Text = "Test"; or similar.

    private void textNazwa_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        changesToClient = true;
    }

How do I make the event only fire on user interaction and not code changes?

Answer 1

The event itself does not make a distinction between text entered via user input and text changed via code. You’ll have to set a flag yourself that tells your code to ignore the event. For example,

private bool ignoreTextChanged;

private void textNazwa_TextCanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (ignoreTextChanged) return;
}

Then use this to set the text instead of just calling Text = "...";:

private void SetTextboxText(string text)
{
    ignoreTextChanged = true;

    textNazwa.Text = text;

    ignoreTextChanged = false;
}

Judging by your comment to another answer, it sounds like you have quite a number of textboxes. In that case, you could modify the function in this way:

private void SetTextBoxText(TextBox box, string text)
{
    ignoreTextChanged = true;

    box.Text = text;

    ignoreTextChanged = false;
}

Then call it like this:

SetTextBoxText(textNazwa, "foo");

This would accomplish the same thing as just doing textNazwa.Text = "foo", but will set the flag letting your event handler know to ignore the event.