Subscribing to mouse events of all controls in form

Question

How can i easily catch the "mouse down" events of all the controls in a form, without manually subscribing to each and every event? (C#) Something like the "KeyPreview" feature, but for the mouse events.

Answer 1

I found this to be the best solution for my purposes.

Create a new class derived from IMessageFilter:

public class GlobalMouseHandler : IMessageFilter
{

    private const int WM_LBUTTONDOWN = 0x201;

    public bool PreFilterMessage(ref Message m)
    {
        if (m.Msg == WM_LBUTTONDOWN)
        {
            // do something
            ((YourMainForm)Form.ActiveForm).YourMainForm_Click(null, null);
        }
        return false;
    }
}

Then in your main form add this to register the message filter:

GlobalMouseHandler globalClick = new GlobalMouseHandler();
Application.AddMessageFilter(globalClick);

And add this function to do whatever you have to, in your form:

public void YourMainForm_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // do anything here...
}