WPF drag distance threshold

Question

I have a program with two WPF treeviews that allow dragging and dropping between the two. The problem is, it can be annoying to open / close items on the treeviews because moving the mouse just one pixel while holding the left mouse button triggers the drag / drop functionality. Is there some way to specify how far the mouse should move before it's considered a drag / drop?

Answer 1

There's a system parameter for this. If you have

Point down = {where mouse down event happened}
Point current = {position in the MouseMove eventargs}

then the mouse has moved the minimum drag distance if

Math.Abs(current.X - down.X) >= SystemParameters.MinimumHorizontalDragDistance ||
Math.Abs(current.Y - down.Y) >= SystemParameters.MinimumVerticalDragDistance

Answer 2

Just build a little buffer into your code that determines when the drag starts.

1. flag mouse down
2. on mouse move - check for mouse down.. if yes, check to see if its moved farther than whatever buffer you specify (3 pixels is probably good)
3. if it has, start the drag.

Answer 3

Following this article for Drag and Drop implementation, you would have to handle 2 mouse events in order to delay the dragging until the mouse has moved a certain distance. First, add a handler for PreviewMouseDown which stores the initial mouse position relative to your control. Don't use the MouseDown event because it is a bubbling event and may have been handled by a child control before reaching your control.

public class DraggableControl : UserControl
{
  private Point? _initialMousePosition;

  public DraggableControl()
  {
    PreviewMouseDown += OnPreviewMouseDown;
  }

  private void OnPreviewMouseDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) {
    _initialMousePosition = e.GetPosition(this);
  }

Additionally, handle MouseMove to check the moved distance and eventually initiate the drag operation:

  ...
  public DraggableControl()
  {
    ...
    MouseMove += OnMouseMove;
  }
  ...
  private void OnMouseMove(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
  {
    // Calculate distance between inital and updated mouse position
    var movedDistance = (_initialMousePosition - e.GetPosition(this)).Length;
    if (movedDistance > yourThreshold)
    {
      DragDrop.DoDragDrop(...);
    }
  }
}