WPFTabTipMixedhardware

Simple TabTip / Virtual Keyboard integration for WPF apps with touchscreen and/or keyboard and/or mouse.

Package

Available via nuget

Getting started

You can bind TabTip automation logic to any UIElement. Virtual Keyboard will open when any such element will get touched/clicker/focused, and it will close when element will lose focus. Not only that, but TabTipAutomation will move UIElement (or Window) into view, so that TabTip will not block focused element.

Hardware keyboard detection and mouse event

By default TabTip automation will occur only on touch, independently with hardware keyboard plugged. Default behavior can be change with two properties :

• TabTipAutomation.AutomationTriggers : You can choose one or multiple trigger (default is TabTipAutomationTrigger.OnTouch) with the following values :

public enum TabTipAutomationTrigger
{
    OnTouch, 
    OnMouse, 
    OnFocus
}

• TabTipAutomation.IgnoreHardwareKeyboard : You can change the hardware keyboard detection with the following values :

public enum HardwareKeyboardIgnoreOptions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Do not ignore any keyboard.
    /// </summary>
    DoNotIgnore,

    /// <summary>
    /// Ignore keyboard, if there is only one, and it's description 
    /// can be found in ListOfKeyboardsToIgnore.
    /// </summary>
    IgnoreIfSingleInstanceOnList,

    /// <summary>
    /// Ignore keyboard, if there is only one.
    /// </summary>
    IgnoreIfSingleInstance,
        
    /// <summary>
    /// Ignore all keyboards for which the description 
    /// can be found in ListOfKeyboardsToIgnore
    /// </summary>
    IgnoreIfOnList,

    /// <summary>
    /// Ignore all keyboards
    /// </summary>
    IgnoreAll
}

If you want to ignore specific keyboard you should set TabTipAutomation.IgnoreHardwareKeyboard to either IgnoreIfSingleInstanceOnList or IgnoreIfOnList, and add keyboard description to TabTipAutomation.ListOfKeyboardsToIgnore.

To get description of keyboards connected to machine you can use following code:

new ManagementObjectSearcher(new SelectQuery("Win32_Keyboard")).Get()
                .Cast<ManagementBaseObject>()
                .SelectMany(keyboard =>
                    keyboard.Properties
                        .Cast<PropertyData>()
                        .Where(k => k.Name == "Description")
                        .Select(k => k.Value as string))
                .ToList();

You can temporarily disable the functionnality using the IsEnabled property (default value true).
During a disable scenario the TabTip keyboard wont show (included in other application). To change this behavior you must set AutoCloseTabTipWhenDisabled to false.

Change keyboard layout

To specify keyboard layout to be used with certain element you can set InputScope property in xaml to one of the following:

• Default
• Url
• EmailSmtpAddress
• Number

More value available in .Net documentation.

Test

You can test the behaviors with the included test application. Set UITest project as 'Set as startup projet' and run.

Framework Support

.Net Framework 4.72 .Net Framework 4.8 .Net Core 3.1 .Net 5.0-windows