How - to: Change the Default Keyboard Behavior in RadGridView for Silverlight/ WPF

RadGridView provides a set of keyboard navigation scenarios that will result in certain consequence of commands to be executed. Thus – and naturally in this case - when clicking on the Del–button will cause deletion of the current item, Ins-button will add a new one into the grid. However, there exists a great possibility that you do not need this pre-coded behavior and you want to predefine it.

In that case you can follow up one of the following two scenarios. The first one is to use the basic interface responsible for the keyboard navigation – IKeyboardCommandProvider and implement your own logic. On utilizing this possibility you will be provided with a more “global” way of changing the behavior of all keys.   However, in this case comes out the requirement to predefine every command. Another – and much easier approach– is to create a custom class that inherits DefaultKeyboardCommandProvider and to override the ProvideCommandsForKey(Key key) method.Thus you will be able to change just a few details and get the desired behavior.  

The provided commands for the grid are as follows:

• BeginInsert, Delete
• CommitEdit, BeginEdit, CancelCellEdit, CancelRowEdit;
• MoveLeft, MoveRight, MoveDown, MoveNext, MovePrevious
• SelectCurrentItem, SelectCurrentUnit, ExtendSelectionToCurrentUnit
• ActivateRow
• ExpandHierarchyItem, CollapseHierarchyItem

All of them are hosted in the class RadGridViewCommands and enable the user to create the desired way of action responding to the usage of a certain key.

However, there are some important notes to be mentioned here. Firstly, once the commands are cleared from the list, the grid is no longer responsible for their handling. And secondly, there is a possibility that some of them may not be completed. For example in case the validation of a certain field fails, no CommitEdit will be executed.

Now having in mind those commands and the hints given above, let us try to produce a real scenario walking through the necessary steps one by one.

1. Set the goal – the default behavior of RadGridView when the CurrentCell is in edit-mode and the Enter-button is clicked is to move down and put the cell below into edit-mode too. However, what we want in this case is just to stay in the same row without editing the next item. Furthermore, another set of actions that we require to change is in the situation of having a GridViewSelectionColumn and clicking the Tab-button. This will cause all the selected rows to be deselected but the current one. Our aim will be every item to stay in the same stay as it has been.

2. Predefine the commands to be executed - at this step we need to create custom class – CustomKeyboardCommandProvider for example, inherit the DefaultKeyboardCommandProvider  and override the method ProvideCommandsForKey(Key key).

• create the constructor for the class:

public CustomKeyboardCommandProvider(GridViewDataControl grid) : base(grid)

{

    this.parentGrid = grid;

}

 

• override the ProvideCommandsForKey method:

3. Set the Keyboard Provider for the application in the main class:

And that’s it !

In future we are planning to improve that whole sequence of steps and to enable the user to change the keyboard behavior much easier. So far the idea is to expose some specific properties on DefaultKeyboardCommandProvider facilitating the process and setting them will generate the desired result. 

You can test the newly-developed behavior in the application below:

The same sequence of steps is also applicable in WPF.The application for Silverlight can be downloaded from here.