Open next ContextMenu in VisualTree when current Element has no focus

Question

i must confess i couldn't find a better title.

I have a Control which contains in the lower part a TextBox. This control has a ContextMenu and of course the TextBox has its normal text editing ContextMenu. When i right click the outer control its ContextMenu opens, which is what i want. If i right click the textbox it gets the focus and opens it text editing context menu. But when i right click the textbox and it doesn't has the keyboard focus i don't want the focus set and don't want to open the textbox contextmenu, instead it should open the outer control contextmenu.

The only thing i managed was to ignore the contextmenu of the textbox, when right clicking the textbox. (for testing i created a control derived from TextBox)

protected override void OnMouseDown(MouseButtonEventArgs aArgs)
    {
        if(aArgs.ChangedButton == MouseButton.Right)
        {
              return;
        }

        base.OnMouseDown(aArgs);
    }

Even doing this, the textboxes OnContextMenuOpening gets fired but no matter if handled is true or false, no context menu at all opens.

I hope someone has an idea.

Does the same thing happen if you use PreviewMouseDown instead of MouseDown? — Rachel
@Rachel hm, haven't tried it, but i would say no, because i don't handle the mouse event. I hoped, that returning from this mouse handling would pass the event to the next control underneath it. But i will give it a try. — dowhilefor

dowhilefor dowhilefor · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-26T09:45:46

The solution that works for me is so simple, i wonder why i didn't thought about it before. When the control is loaded or the element loses the focus, i just store the elements ContextMenu in a temporary variable and null the actual ContextMenu, if the element gets the Focus, i restore it from the temporary stored ContextMenu. This works suprisingly well, and can be nicely wrapped into an attached behavior.

Open next ContextMenu in VisualTree when current Element has no focus

1 Answers