Question

When I test my Silverlight 2 app in Firefox, when Silverlight has focus, I have no problem receiving every key press via the Page.KeyDown event.

When I test it in Internet Explorer 7, I can only get keyboard events that the browser doesn’t already handle. HOWEVER, I can override those same keyboard events in javascript.

For instance, Ctrl + D. I can override this in javascript by doing the following, but I can’t do the same thing in Silverlight!!

function initKeyHandling(){ document.attachEvent("onkeydown", keydown); }

function keydown(e) { printToTextbox('Keydown ', e); return false; }

...

initKeyHandling();

Furthermore, my attempts to forward the events from Javascript to Silverlight have failed. My javascript keyboard event handlers never even get fired when Silverlight has focus.

Answer 1

From the docs it seems that it is not possible (at least without a javascript work around like you are mentioning):

Keyboard Events and the Browser
Different browsers might handle
keyboard events differently. When you
create an application that uses
keyboard input, make sure to test the
application in your target browsers.

The browser determines which
keystrokes it interprets as commands
and which keystrokes it passes on to
hosted content. This means that
certain keystrokes cannot be retrieved
from KeyDown and KeyUp event-handler
functions. Most keystrokes that a
browser interprets as commands are
shortcut or accelerator keystrokes,
and are not passed as key events to
Silverlight. For example, CTRL+D is a
shortcut keystroke combination for
adding a favorite URL to the Firefox
and Internet Explorer browsers, and
neither CTRL nor D is reported as a
key event.

Have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189015.aspx

I think I read about a work around with an underlying HTML textbox the other day. But I’m not sure if it still supported, or what the details were. I will return if I find it again.

/Asger