Detect keypress in WPF Tooltip

In WPF I wanted to create a custom tooltip that, when open, could detect F1 key press, to take the user to a more detailed help file.

For reusability, my approach is to create a UserControl as a tooltip. The control will detect the KeyDown event and then execute a bindable Command.

But in practice the KeyDown event never appears to fire. Maybe Tooltips are not focusable for keyboard events? I have tried setting the KeyDown event for the UserControl, then for child controls inside the UserControl, no luck either way.

Here is (one example) of UserControl with KeyDown event:

<UserControl x:Class="HotKeyToolTip"
         xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
         xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
         xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
         xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" 
         mc:Ignorable="d" 
         KeyDown="UserControl_KeyDown">

Here is an example of how this control would be declared as a tooltip, in this case for the items of a combobox:

<ComboBox.ItemContainerStyle>
                    <Style>
                        <Setter Property="Control.ToolTip">
                            <Setter.Value>
                                <local:HotKeyToolTip Focusable="True"/>
                            </Setter.Value>
                        </Setter>
                    </Style>
                </ComboBox.ItemContainerStyle>

Detect keypress in WPF Tooltip

1 Answers