asked on

activating inactive application without changing focus

I have an application with a form that contains quite a few edit boxes. Suppose EditBoxA has the focus and I switch to another application without ocluding my application window. Now, if I return to my application by clicking on the form and I happen to hit another Edit Box, say EditBoxB,, my application becomes active and the focus has now changed to EditBoxB. Microsoft application such as Excel do not behave like this. How can I get my application to become active without changing the focus no matter where the user might click on the form to make the application active?

_Katka_

Hi, you may save the active component
on Form.OnDeactivate and restore it by
SetFocus on Form.OnActivate. Just like:

var
Saved:TWinControl;

procedure Form1.FormDeactivate(Sender:TObject);
begin
Saved:=ActiveControl;
end;

procedure Form1.FormActivate(Sender:TObject);
begin
if Assigned(Saved) then Saved.SetFocus;
end;

regards,
Kate

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_Katka_

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Jim Culpepper

ASKER

Trapping the event on the form didn't seem to work. However, adding an Application Events component to the form such as the following worked great:

procedure TMainForm.ApplicationEvents1Activate(Sender: TObject);
begin
if Assigned(SavedActiveComponent)
then SavedActiveComponent.SetFocus;
end;

procedure TMainForm.ApplicationEvents1Deactivate(Sender: TObject);
begin
SavedActiveComponent := self.ActiveControl;
end;

Thanks for the insight.

_Katka_

You're welcome :)

Kate