VB forms have KeyPress, KeyUp, and KeyDown
events with behavior exactly like that of the same events for individual controls.
By default, a form's three
Keystroke events are not enabled. Even if you
wrote code in the event procedures of Form_KeyPress,
Form_KeyUp, or Form_KeyDown, nothing would happen.
In order to
enable these form events, you must set the form's
KeyPreview property to True (its default value
is False).
Once you've set the form's
KeyPreview property to True and placed code
in its Keystroke events, you have enabled two-tier
keyboard validation. In other words, keyboard
information will pass through two successive
sets of validation routines: the form's
Keystroke routines and then the keystroke routines
for the control that currently has the focus.
When KeyPreview is True, the
form's Keystroke events will run first.
If the form's Keystroke event procedures
modify the keystroke information, then the control's
Keystroke events will receive that modified
information and not the original keystroke information.
So, for example, if a form's
KeyPress event procedure changes all characters
to uppercase, then no control on the form will
ever see a lowercase character in its KeyPress
event.
Use common sense to decide whether to put keystroke validation
code at the form or the control level. If you need some validation to take place
for all keystrokes on the entire form (e.g., all characters in all fields need
to be uppercase), then that validation should happen in the form-level Keystroke
event procedures. Control-specific validation should happen in control Keystroke
event procedures.
Keystroke Events at Field and Form Level topics
