Develop Reference

How do I control the focus order for TextBoxes inside a panel?

I have a Form with many TextBoxes. I need some TextBoxes inside one group, and other text boxes inside another group. By group, I just need a way to make these TextBoxes appear to belong with each other.
I made two Panels and added the TextBoxes to them. Then, I placed a border around these Panels.
However, my problem is that when I press Tab, the focus doesn't go to the next TextBox, but rather it goes in a random order to another TextBox. Sometimes the next TextBox is inside the first Panel, other times it is in the second Panel. How can I control the focus order?
This is an image to illustrate my point:

Tab order should be set like this. Both top container panel should have TabIndex 0 and 1 respectively and its child control should have TabIndex prefix by their parent control Tab Index. ie. if the Panel1 has TabIndex 0 then its child controls should have TabIndex 0.0,0.1,0.2,0.3...
NOTE: make sure that if the Tab Stop property of any control is set to false then cursor will not move into that control. In that case TabIndex will not work.

As others have said, use the TabIndex property to indicate the tabbing order, and the TabStop property to determine whether or not the control can be tabbed to at all.
However, there is a much simpler way to do this from the designer. When looking at your form in the designer, make sure your form is selected (and not a control on the form) (you can do this by clicking once in the whitespace around the form), and then choose View -> Tab Order.
With the tab order designer active, you will see the TabIndexes of every control. Click them in the order you would like to be able to tab through them. The TabIndex tooltips will change from blue to white as you assign them. When you are done, choose View -> Tab Order again to return to the normal designer state.
Another thing to mention would be to suggest using UserControls whenever possible. If you reuse parts of your UI with good design of UserControls, you can avoid having a form with dozens and dozens of tab stops to assign, since each UserControl will have its own internal tabbing order that will automatically apply when placed on a Form, and you will only have to set the TabIndex of the UserControl itself.

When you select a textbox on your designer, you should see a property for the textbox called the TabIndex. When tabbing through controls, focus goes to the component with the next highest TabIndex.
You'll want to set the TabIndex for each of the boxes so that tabbing rotates through the boxes in the order that you expect.

From MSDN - Control.TabIndex:
A tab index can consist of any valid integer greater than or equal to
zero, lower numbers being earlier in the tab order. If more than one
control on the same parent control has the same tab index, the z-order
of the controls determines the order to cycle through the controls.
For a control to be included in the tab order, its TabStop property
must be set to true.
Accordingly,
textbox1.TabIndex = 1; // and do the same for each one in the desired order
textbox1.TabStop = true;

You need to set the TabIndex property of the TextBox Controls.
From MSDN : Control.TabIndex
Gets or sets the tab order of the control within its container.
For a control to be included in the tab order, its TabStop property
must be set to true.
Try This: (Example)
txtTextBox1.TabIndex = 1;
txtTextBox2.TabIndex = 2;
txtTextBox3.TabIndex = 3;
in the above example Tab Focus order is as below:
txtTextBox1
txtTextBox2
txtTextBox3
Note: You need to make sure that TabStop property of the textbox controls are set to True otherwise tab ordering does not work,but by default when you are designing controls using Visual Studio IDE(using drag and drop functionality) TabStop property is set to True.
From MSDN : Control.TabStop
Gets or sets a value indicating whether the user can give the focus to this control using the TAB key.
Try This: Setting TabStop property
txtTextBox1.TabIndex = 1;
txtTextBox1.TabStop = True;
txtTextBox2.TabIndex = 2;
txtTextBox2.TabStop = True;
txtTextBox3.TabIndex = 3;
txtTextBox3.TabStop = True;

How to enable tabbing for propterty grid

Does anybody know how to enable tabbing for a property grid?
Right know when I select a property and press tab the input field for that property is selected. If i press tab again the control loses focus.
Instead I want to focus the next property then the assigned input field then the next property then the assigned input field again and so on...
thank you.

Textbox focus skipping on pressing TAB

I have app where I have multiple textboxes and I would like to do when the user is focused in one textbox when he presses TAB button on keyboard I would like to skip the focus into other textbox which I will set.
Is there any way to do that easily? I have 20 textboxes in this form and I need it to skip from textbox1 to textbox2 to textbox3....textbox20 when press the TAB key.

First of all you have to set the tab index of each text box,
you can set either from the properties window (for each textbox ) or set by selecting the menu
view->Taborder.
you can set the tab index and by pressing the Tab key the control wil automatically transfer from 1 textbox to another.

Sounds like you're looking for the TabIndex property, which is an integer value you can assign to controls either in code or in the designer properties window:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.tabindex.aspx
See also the TabStop property:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.tabstop.aspx
Example:
TextBox1.TabIndex = 2;
TextBox2.TabStop = false;
TextBox3.TabIndex = 99;
With focus on TextBox1, pressing tab will jump to TextBox3, then back to TextBox1, and obviously TextBox2 is skipped.

in c# every Control has a property called tabStop and tabIndex
setting the tabIndex one after the other will make that when you press tab from one one textBox you'll get focus on the other
if you want a control not to get focus when pressing tab, though i'm not sure u want, but your question isn't clear on that so i didn't want you to miss it, put true in tabStop

HOW to set Focus on a hidden Textbox

In my page_load event I have this code :
myTextbox.focus().
So when I set my textbox to visible=false my code doesn't work.

Hidden controls are not focusable. Set the Opacity to 0 instead.

You cannot. If something isn't rendered, it cannot be interacted with, so you cannot set the focus to it.

Focus means that user input is focused to the control, that means if the control is a text-box, the text input cursor will be placed in the control or if it is a checkbox, the checkbox will be focused and may be selected by pressing space, you can't put a text input cursor in a hidden control and it cannot be used for any user input.
If you still want to set focus for some reason, try setting its height and width to Zero.
Like style="height:0px; width:0px"
and use Page.SetFocus(yourControl); to set focus

When you set the Control.Visible property to false it doesn't just hide the control on the page. It omits that control from being rendered on the client's browser entirely, but "remembers" everything about that control on the server for future postbacks.
If you actually do a client side hide (i.e. set the CSS Style display: none; then it will still exist on the page, but just be hidden. At that point you can focus it.

How to Set Up Winform Textbox Field Focus so a User Can Go Through Them by Clicking Tab Button?

UI is created in VS 2008. I'm using C# .... I need to let the user move/focus between text fields from top to bottom by clicking tab button. How can i do it?

On the Layout toolbar (will normally show up if you're in Design View) click on the buttom on the most right (it's called tab order).
Now on every element on your designer will come up a little box with a number. Just click all your elements in the order you like and they will automatically be re-ordered.
If you like to do it manually, just take ho1 advice and change the property manually.

You just set up the TabIndex property properly, so that it's sequential from top to bottom. Then it'll work automatically and you won't need any code to move around the focus.
So in other words, set the top TextBox TabIndex to 1, the next one you set to 2 etc and then one at the bottom will have the highest number (of the textboxes, you probably want to have even higher indexes for any OK buttons and similar so that the user can jump to them after editing all the textboxes).
You can find more info about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.control.tabindex.aspx