How to programmatically set keyboard focus to the web view (without requiring an initial mouse click)?

[davidroth]

Hi!

Congrats for open sourcing this library!

I am migrating a Blazor Server application hosted in Electron to Avalonia, using NativeWebDialog as the main window wrapper. Everything loads correctly, but I am running into a strict focus issue.

When the dialog opens and the web page loads, the web view does not receive keyboard events (e.g., typing in a textbox or global key-down events). To get keyboard events to register, I have to physically click anywhere inside the loaded web page first. After that initial click, it works perfectly.

Is there a recommended way to programmatically hand over the OS-level keyboard focus to the embedded web view upon launch?

I attempted to workaround this by grabbing the native window handle to forcefully invoke SetFocus via user32.dll. However, calling TryGetPlatformHandle() on the dialog/window consistently returns null (tested on Windows), blocking this workaround.

A built-in, simple API (e.g., dialog.FocusWebView()) would be highly preferable to ensure a consistent cross-platform experience without forcing developers to drop into native interop for a standard UI requirement.

Thanks!

[maxkatz6]

NativeWebView automatically sets focus on the native control, when avalonia control is focused (should be this code). But that only supports these backends with IWebViewAdapterWithFocus implemented. So you could just call myNativeWebView.Focus() for your requirement.

NativeWebDialog, as far as I remember, doesn't have anything like that implemented.

However, calling TryGetPlatformHandle() on the dialog/window consistently returns null (tested on Windows), blocking this workaround.

TryGetPlatformHandle returns null, if platform handle is not yet initialized.

[davidroth]

I am using NativeWebDialog because, according to the documentation, NativeWebView does not yet support Linux and I require cross-platform compatibility. However, after reviewing the implementation, I discovered that NativeWebDialog contains a private TryGetAdapter method. I attempted to access it via reflection as follows:

  dialog.AdapterCreated += (sender, e) =>
  {
      var adapter = sender.GetType().GetMethod("TryGetAdapter", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance)?.Invoke(sender, null);
      adapter?.GetType().GetMethod("Focus")?.Invoke(adapter, null);
  };

This works and so I am happy for now 😀

This is clearly a workaround, so it would be beneficial if a public API were available to simplify the process and eliminate the need for the reflection hack.