Capture hotkey in browsers

Question

I'm doing SWF application which will run in browser. And I want to capture CTRL+F key pressing event when Flex application is in focus.

In Firefox it works fine but in Opera and Safari browser captures event prior to Flex application and Find Dialog pop-ups.

Is there any way for flex application to capture CTRL+F event prior browser?

Answer 1

I asked this same question recently and have been playing around with it.

I came up with this gist on github:

Browser KeyboardEvent Hijacking with Javascript and Flex

CTRL-F works!

Check out the javascript in there. Basically, with Safari, you can only hear the meta keys (ctrl/alt/shift, etc.); it won't allow javascript to hear A-Z events if Flash is running for some reason. So I just listen for the meta keys in javascript, and then call window.focus() in javascript. That sets focus to the browser, making it so you can hijack browser keyboard events!. Then I listen for the A-Z events or whatever, and pass those to Flex.

The next step is to just restore focus in your Flex app to wherever it was before that, which should be easy.

Cheers, Lance