Navigating GWT / GXT components by pressing Enter

Question

I want to know if there is any way to navigate Dialog components by pressing the Enter Key in the same manner natively implemented by the TAB key?

Answer 1

Though I haven't tried it by handling the keyDown and keyUp events certainly it seems doable. Though you may not be able to intercept the browser produced dialog boxes this way and other dialogs created using Window.alert(). How are you creating the dialogs ?

Answer 2

The tab key is the browser doing the work of changing focus - nothing special needs to be added, you'll find that tab works on any form on the internet (except where explicitly disabled for some reason...).

To move focus with the enter key, you must listen for the onkeydown event (focus change via tab also occurs onkeydown, so selecting this for consistency), check if it was the enter key, and if so, move focus to the next element in the list.

Typical tab focus behavior involves the browser checking the tabIndex of the elements on the page, and finding the next element on the page with a higher tabIndex, or the nearest subsequent sibling/cousin element. I don't have a method to implement this easily, so instead I'm going to focus on just going to the next widget.

GXT 3's FormPanelHelper has some handy methods to look for all Fields - this code could be used as a basis for non-GXT fields as well. Track all FocusEvent and BlurEvent from the fields found in the dialog, and use that to always track the currently focused field. Add a key handler to the dialog itself, to capture all key events, and check if one is the enter key. If so, figure out what the next field is from the currently focused field, and invoke .focus() on it - this will trigger the focus handler described above, so your bookkeeping will be updated correctly.

And as @eliran-m noted, consider leaving the tab key alone - don't get in the way of users navigating the way they are used to. Adding new functionality might be a good thing, but taking away expected behavior probably isn't.