Is there a way to stop a Menu from closing when you click on it?

Question

We have a form in our program that allows a user to determine what a user can see when setting privileges, by using a menu bar. When a user clicks on an item, that item then is "selected" (gets a tick next to it). However, this also closes the menu.

Is there a way to stop this menu from closing (without affecting any other menu's in the program) when a user clicks on it? So far I have not found anything in the settings, and any _click methods are not affecting it either.

Answer 1

Listen the ToolStripDropDownClosingEventHandler present in ToolStripDropDown. To do this just access the ToolStripMenuItem.DropDown Property, and so, add a listener that will handle the Closing event. We just need to check if the mouse pointer it's inside of toolStrip rectangle and this can be done with this piece of code:

private void ListenToolStripMenuItems(IEnumerable<ToolStripMenuItem> menuItems)
{
    // listen all menuItems
    foreach (ToolStrip menuItem in menuItems)
        menuItem.DropDown.Closing += OnToolStripDropDownClosing;
}

private void OnToolStripDropDownClosing(object sender, ToolStripDropDownClosingEventArgs e)
{
        var tsdd = (ToolStripDropDown)sender;

        // checking if mouse cursor is inside
        Point p = tsdd.PointToClient(Control.MousePosition);  
        if (tsdd.DisplayRectangle.Contains(p))
            e.Cancel = true;  // cancel closing
}

This way the AutoClose still working and the toolStrip will close properly.

Answer 2

I'm a hack, but I would do this for each item you can click:

 sampleNameToolStripMenuItem.ShowDropDown();

That way whenever you click something, it will also drop the menu down again right after.