WPF Tab Key Navigation

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WPF treats the entire UI Tree as a single Tab scope. It isn’t broken up into smaller areas such as you would expect. This includes controls inside UserControls.

For example, if you had

<StackPanel>
    <TextBox Name="TextBox1" />
    <MyUserControl />
    <TextBox Name="TextBox3" />
</StackPanel>

And MyUserControl looked like

<MyUserControl>
    <TextBox Name="TextBox2"  />
</MyUserControl>

The default tab cycle would be TextBox1, TextBox2, TextBox3. This is because no TabIndex properties are defined, so all controls run at the default tab order, which is the order in which they’re added to the UI.

If you set the TabIndex on your controls such as below, 

<StackPanel>
    <TextBox Name="TextBox1" TabIndex="1" />
    <MyUserControl TabIndex="2" />
    <TextBox Name="TextBox3" TabIndex="3" />
</StackPanel>

Your tabbing would change to TextBox1, TextBox3, TextBox2. This is because TextBox2 doesn’t have a TabIndex specified, so the default is assumed and it is tabbed to after all the other controls with a TabIndex specified get cycled through.

The way I usually get around this is to bind the TabIndex of controls inside the UserControl to the UserControl.TabIndex.

For example adding the following binding to the UserControl would make the Tab cycle correct again

<MyUserControl>
    <TextBox Name="TextBox2" TabIndex="{Binding Path=TabIndex, RelativeSource={RelativeSource AncestorType={x:Type local:MyUserControl}}}" />
</MyUserControl>

I usually prefer to set this binding in the Loaded event of the UserControl instead of having to remember to set this binding on all the controls inside the UserControl. I’m sure there are also more efficient ways of doing this as well, however the problem has not come up often enough for me to sit down and take the time to research how to use tab scopes correctly to avoid this workaround.

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