How to prevent focus of a select object?

[Doug_Dyer]

Anyone know how to prevent the focus of the SELECT guy?

I want to disable it, but the disabled=true blurs out the text.

I currently have an ONFOCUS event handler that checks my criteria and calls element.focus() or element.blur().

This works for the textboxes but not SELECT.


Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Doug

[Rick Bull]

Well I would have thought this would work:


<select onfocus="this.blur();">


not sure why it doesn't (if that's what you had). But remember not everyone has JavaScript enabled, so using the disabled attribute is a more compatible way of doing it.

EDIT: having re-read it I get the impression you're setting the disabled attribute through JS anyway, so my last comments was a bit pointless :D

[Doug_Dyer]

Well I am using IE 5.0+ on win2000. Id have thought this.blur() would have worked. Try it, I sure cant get it going :(

Turns out the only way to prevent modification without disabling (which affects visibility) is to REDIRECT the focus! And not only that you have to replace several methods:

<select onmousedown="blah(this);" ondblclick="blah(this);" onfocus="blah(this);">

(Can't remember the exact spelling of the onmousedown method)

blah(element)
{
if (my criteria to prevent changes == true)
nextelement.focus();
}


Incidentally, if given an element, is there a quick way to get the next element or previous element in the form element array?

[Rick Bull]

You're right it doesn't work in IE, although it does work in Opera and Mozilla, so I can only put it down to a bug with events and <select>. I did think of returning false onfocus/click/mousedown but that doesn't work either. Not sure about the next/prev elements thing, sorry.

[i_cypher]

Have you tried setting the TABINDEX="-1"?

c.f.: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534654(v=vs.85).aspx

Under Remarks:

"3.Objects with a negative tabIndex are omitted from the tabbing order."