FIX: CTRL+C Does Not Copy From a Locked TextBox

• Microsoft Visual Basic Professional and Enterprise Editions for Windows, version 6.0

SYMPTOMS

If a textbox on a form has its Locked property set to True, and the CTRL+C shortcut is used to copy text in the textbox, the selected text will not be copied to the clipboard.

RESOLUTION

To work around this behavior, you must use the textbox's KeyDown event to check for a CTRL+C key combination. If CTRL+C does occur, then you must programatically put the selected text on the clipboard, as follows:

   If KeyCode = 67 And Shift = vbCtrlMask Then
       Clipboard.Clear
       Clipboard.SetText Text1.SelText
   End If 

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article.

This bug was corrected in Visual Studio 6.0 Service Pack 3.

For more information about Visual Studio 6.0 Service Packs, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:


Q194022 INFO: Visual Studio 6.0 Service Packs, What, Where, Why

Q194295 HOWTO: Tell That Visual Studio 6.0 Service Packs Are Installed

MORE INFORMATION

Steps to Reproduce Behavior

1. Create a new Visual Basic standard EXE project. Form1 is created by default.



2. Add a textbox to the default form.



3. Add the following code to the default form's Form_Load event:




Private Sub Form_Load()
    Text1.Locked = True
    Text1.Text = "This is a test."
End Sub 



4. Run the program. While the program is running, highlight the text in the textbox and hit CTRL+C. Then, try to paste test into Notepad or another editor. You will note that nothing is pasted or some text from an earlier copy and paste operation is pasted from the clipboard.



5. To work around the problem, add the following code to the textbox's KeyDown event:




Private Sub Text1_KeyDown(KeyCode As Integer, Shift As Integer)
   If KeyCode = 67 And Shift = vbCtrlMask Then
       Clipboard.Clear
       Clipboard.SetText Text1.SelText
   End If
End Sub 

6. Run the program and try the copy-paste operation again. This time it will work properly.

REFERENCES

Online Help for Microsoft Visual Basic, version 6.0

Additional query words: keyboard

Keywords          : kbservicepack kbClipboard kbVBp kbVBp600bug kbVS600sp3fix 
Version           : WINDOWS:6.0
Platform          : WINDOWS 
Issue type        : kbbug 

Last Reviewed: May 19, 1999