VB Forum / Enterprise Development / December 2005

Right and Left arrow keys change fields, Up and Down arrow keys change
values.

Rick

If you mean you always want the minutes field to be "active" whenever the
control itself gets focus, no, I don't think there is (I even looked in the
Platform SDK to see if there was a message you could send to do
this...nothing). Rick already explained that you use the right and left
arrow keys to move between fields. Using Tab to do this would be extremely
non-standard and probably only confuse and/or frustrate users.  Standard
behavior for the Tab key is to move focus from control to control, not move
from field to field within a control (of course, there are always
exceptions).

On or about 4/12/2005 3:57 AM,  Robertico was seen in the vicinity and
allegedly stated:

I asume you want the control to /start/ in the hours, then move to the
minutes when the user presses 'tab'???

You could use:

   * LostFocus event - you can insert code to:
         o check if the monutes have been altered
         o set the focus back to the dtp control
         o use the 'SendKeys' method to press the right-arrow for the user
   * Keypress event - this is not just for a form, but can be used for
     any object.  It allows you to capture all the keys pressed while
     that object has focus, then to handle that keypress however you
     like.  Ideally you could discard the keys you don't want, and just
     call a function or sub for the 'tab' key which would do similar
     actions to those above.
   * Use separate controls for hours, minutes, seconds, etc.  Set the
     max/min ranges for separate spinner controls (0-23,0-59,0-59) and
     set the tab order to go from one to the next.  Use code in the
     'lostFocus' event for them to transfer the value to variables,
     then use the DateValue() function (or your own function) to get a
     combined time value.

Lots of ways to get this done - defninitely not impossible.  Read the
MSDN/help documentation for the keypress event carefully before using
it, as an incorrectly written block of code here will either capture or
discard /all/ input from the keyboard and leave you no way to exit that
control (or you application).

Have fun!

Are you aware of the fact that the DTPicker will move field focus with
CTRL+Tab?

Also, I've noticed that if the DTPicker is the only control on the form, Tab
key presses will actually move field focus.
This is also true when there are sevral controls and they're all set with
TabStop = True. I'm guessing you could write a routine to set all controls
in a form to have the TabStop property set to False when the DTPicker
recieves the focus and somehow reset it to True when the the user is done
with it.

HTH,
Andy.