Uno support for user inputs

Supported user inputs

User inputs are usually propagated using RoutedEvents. See Uno's routed events documentation to better understand their implementation on Uno.

Routed Event Android iOS/Catalyst Wasm Skia Desktop
focus events
GotFocus Yes Yes (1) Yes (1) Yes Documentation
LostFocus Yes Yes (1) Yes (1) Yes Documentation
keyboard events
KeyDown Hardware Only (2) Yes (2) Yes Yes Documentation
KeyUp Hardware Only (2) Yes (2) Yes Yes Documentation
pointer events
PointerCanceled Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerCaptureLost Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerEntered Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerExited Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerMoved Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerPressed Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerReleased Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
PointerWheelChanged No No Yes Yes Documentation
manipulation events
ManipulationStarting Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
ManipulationStarted Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
ManipulationDelta Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
ManipulationInertiaStarting Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
ManipulationCompleted Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
gesture events
Tapped Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
DoubleTapped Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
RightTapped Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
Holding Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
drag and drop
DragStarting Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
DragEnter Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
DragOver Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
DragLeave Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
Drop Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation
DropCompleted Yes Yes Yes Yes Documentation

Notes:

  1. Focus events:
    • iOS: The concept of focus is emulated because it's not supported by the platform, so this event is always bubbling in managed code.
    • Wasm: Current implementation is not totally reliable and doesn't support lost focus most of the time.
  2. Keyboard events:
    • Android: KeyDown and KeyUp events are generated only from hardware keyboards (Except for the Editor Action on soft keyboards, those are translated as KeyUp with KeyCode.Enter). Some soft keyboard MAY generate those events, but your code shouldn't rely on that. This is a limitation in the Android platform (see note on this link content).

      Because of those limitations, Key Events are not being implemented as routed events on Android, so AddHandler & RemoveHandler won't work for keyboard events. They won't bubble in managed code.

    • iOS: KeyDown & KeyUp routed events are generated from only a TextBox. Only character-related keyboard events are generated. They are implemented as Routed Events and they are always bubbling in managed code.
    • Skia: Keyboard events are supported from CoreWindow.KeyUp and CoreWindow.KeyDown events, as well as UIElement.KeyUp and UIElement.KeyDown events for Skia Desktop.

Pointer Events

These events are the base for all other pointing device related events (i.e. Manipulation, Gesture and drag and dop events). They are directly linked to the native events of each platform:

  • Touches[Began|Moved|Ended|Cancelled] on iOS
  • dispatchTouchEvent and dispatchGenericMotionEvent on Android
  • pointer[enter|leave|down|up|move|cancel] on WebAssembly

On Skia however, they are fully managed events.

Pointers events and the ScrollViewer

Like on WinUI, as soon as the system detects that the user wants to scroll, a control gets a PointerCancelled and that control won't receive any other pointer event until the user releases the pointer. That behavior can be prevented by setting the ManipulationMode to something other than System on a control nested in the ScrollViewer. For more information, see Manipulation events.

Be aware that on iOS, this will set DelaysContentTouches to false. So, it means that it will slightly reduce the performance of the scrolling. For more information, see delaysContentTouches.

Known limitations for pointer events

As those events are tightly coupled to the native events, Uno has to make some compromises:

  • On iOS, when tapping with a mouse or a pen on Android, or in a few other specific cases (like PointerCaptureLost), multiple managed events are raised from a single native event. These have multiple effects:

    • On WinUI if you have a control A and a nested control B, you will get:

      B.PointerEnter
A.PointerEnter
B.PointerPressed
A.PointerPressed

      but with UNO you will get:

      B.PointerEnter
B.PointerPressed
A.PointerEnter
A.PointerPressed

    • If you handle the PointerEnter on B, the parent control A won't get the PointerEnter (as expected) nor the PointerPressed.

  • On Android with a mouse or a pen, the PointerEnter and PointerExit are going to be raised without taking clipping in consideration. This means that you will get the enter earlier and the exit later than on other platforms.
  • On Android if you have an element with a RenderTransform which overlaps one of its sibling elements, the element at the top will get the pointer events.
  • On WASM, iOS, and Android, the RoutedPointerEventArgs.FrameId will be reset to 0 after 49 days of running time of the application.
  • Unlike on WinUI, controls that are under a Popup won't receive the unhandled pointer events.
  • On non-Skia-based platforms, unlike WinUI, it's impossible to receive a PointerReleased without getting a PointerPressed before. (For instance if a child control handled the pressed event but not the released event).

    On WASM as TextElement inherits from UIElement, it means that, unlike WinUI, TextBlock won't raise the PointerReleased event when clicking on a Hyperlink.

  • Unlike WinUI, on the Hyperlink the Click will be raised before the PointerReleased.
  • The property PointerPointProperties.PointerUpdateKind is not set on Android 5.x and lower (API level < 23)
  • On Firefox, pressed pointers are reported as fingers. This means you will receive events with PointerDeviceType == Pen only for hovering (i.e. Pointer<Enter|Move|Exit> - note that, as of 2019-11-28, once pressed PointerMove will be flagged as "touch") and you won't be able to track the barrel button nor the eraser. For more information, see Bug report on Bugzilla.
  • On WASM, if you touch the screen with the pen then you press the barrel button (still while touching the screen), the pointer events will have the IsRightButtonPressed set (in addition to the IsBarrelButtonPressed). On WinUI and Android, you get this flag only if the barrel button was pressed at the moment where you touched the screen, otherwise, you will have the IsLeftButtonPressed and the IsBarrelButtonPressed.
  • For pen and fingers, the Holding event is not raised after a given delay like on WinUI, but instead, we rely on the fact that we usually get a lot of moves for those kinds of pointers, so we raise the event only when we get a move that exceeds the defined thresholds for holding.
  • On WASM, Shapes must have a non-null Fill to receive pointer events (setting the Stroke is not sufficient).
  • On WASM, if the user scrolls diagonally (e.g. with a Touchpad), but you mark as Handled pointer events only for vertical scrolling, then the events for the horizontal scroll component won't bubble through the parents.

Pointer capture

The capture of pointer is handled in managed code only. On WebAssembly, Uno however still requests the browser to capture the pointer, but Uno does not rely on native [got|lost]pointercapture events.

iPadOS mouse support

To differentiate between mouse and touch device type for pointer events, include the following in your app's Info.plist:

  <key>UIApplicationSupportsIndirectInputEvents</key>
  <true/>

Without this key, the current version of iPadOS reports mouse interaction as normal touch.

Manipulation Events

They are generated from the PointerXXX events (using the Microsoft.UI.Input.GestureRecognizer) and are bubbling in managed only.

Gesture Events

They are generated from the PointerXXX events (using the Microsoft.UI.Input.GestureRecognizer) and are bubbling in managed only.

Note that Tapped and DoubleTapped are not linked in any way to a native equivalent, but are fully interpreted in managed code.

In order to match the WinUI behavior, on WASM, the default "Context menu" of the browser is disabled (except for the TextBox), no matter if you use/handle the RightTapped event or not. Be aware that on some browsers (Firefox for example), the user can still request to get the "Context menu" on right click.

Disabling browser context menu on <input>-based elements

While the browser context menu enabled on TextBox and PasswordBox by default, it will be disabled when ContextFlyout is set on the control.

To manually disable the context menu on a UIElement which represents a HTML <input>, you can manually set the context-menu-disabled CSS class:

#if __WASM__

MyInputElement.SetCssClasses("context-menu-disabled");
#endif

Drag and drop

Those events are also 100% managed events, built from the PointerXXX events (using the Microsoft.UI.Input.GestureRecognizer)

Inter-app drag and drop support

A drag and drop operation can be used to move content within an app, but it can also be used to copy / move / link between apps. While intra-app drag and drop is supported on all platforms without limitations, inter-app drag and drop requires platform-specific support. The table and sections below describe supported functionality and limitations for each platform.

From uno app to external From external app to uno
Android No No
iOS No No
Wasm No Yes (Text, Link, Image, File, Html, Rtf)
macOS Yes (Text, Link, Image, Html, Rtf) Yes (Text, Link, Image, File, Html, Rtf)
Skia Desktop (Windows) Yes (Text, Link, Image, File, Html, Rtf) Yes (Text, Link, Image, File, Html, Rtf)
Skia Linux No No
  • "Link" may refer to WebLink, ApplicationLink, or Uri formats

Wasm Limitations

  1. When dragging content from external app to uno, you cannot retrieve the content from the DataPackage before the Drop event. This a limitations of web browsers. Any attempt to read it before the Drop will result into a timeout exception after a hard coded delay of 10 seconds.
  2. When dragging some uris from external app to uno, only the first uri will be accessible through the WebLink standard format ID.

macOS Limitations

  1. Dragging a File (StorageItem) from an Uno Platform App to an external destination is not currently supported.
  2. When receiving a drop within an Uno Platform App from an external source, key modifiers are not supported

Skia Limitations

  1. There is no standard type for WebLink (nor ApplicationLink) on this platform. They are copied to the external app as raw Text, and converted back as WebLink or ApplicationLink from raw text from the external app when Uri.IsWellFormedUriString(text, UriKind.Absolute) returns true.
  2. The image content seems to not be readable by common apps, only another Uno app can read it properly.

Drag and Drop Data Format Considerations

WinUI has the following standard data formats that correspond with a URI/URL:

  1. Uri, now deprecated in favor of:
  2. WebLink and
  3. ApplicationLink

Several platforms such as macOS, iOS, and Android do not differentiate between them and only use a single URI/URL class or string.

When applying data to the native clipboard or dragging/dropping data from a DataPackage, only one URI/URL may be used. Therefore, all URI data formats are merged together into a single URI using the above-defined priority. WebLink is considered more specific than ApplicationLink.

When pulling data from the native clipboard or drag/drop data, this single native URI/URL is separated into the equivalent UWP data format (since UWP's direct equivalent standard data format 'Uri' is deprecated). The mapping is as follows:

  1. WebLink is used if the given URL/URI has a scheme of "http" or "https"
  2. ApplicationLink is used if not #1

For full compatibility, the Uri format within a DataPackage should still be populated regardless of #1 or #2.

Known issues for drag and drop events

  1. If you have 2 nested drop targets (i.e. element flagged with AllowDrop = true), when the pointer leaves the deepest / top most element but not the parent, the parent element will also raise DragLeave and immediately after raise DragEnter.
  2. On WinUI, the default UI will include a tooltip that indicates the accepted drop action, and a "screenshot" of the dragged element. Currently, Uno will display only the tooltip.
  3. The accepted drop action displayed in the tooltip is not localized.