Mouse.PreviewMouseDown Attached Event

Definition

Occurs when any mouse button is depressed.

see AddPreviewMouseDownHandler, and RemovePreviewMouseDownHandler
see AddPreviewMouseDownHandler, and RemovePreviewMouseDownHandler
see AddPreviewMouseDownHandler, and RemovePreviewMouseDownHandler

Remarks

Which mouse button was depressed is determined by checking the arguments of the event. This is an attached event (using tunneling routing strategy) that is intended through attached event syntax to be referenced by existing user interface (UI) elements that take input.

This is an attached event. WPF implements attached events as routed events. Attached events are fundamentally a XAML language concept for referencing events that can be handled on objects that do not define that event, which WPF expands upon by also enabling the event to traverse a route. Attached events do not have a direct handling syntax in code; to attach handlers for a routed event in code, you use a designated Add*Handler method. For details, see Attached Events Overview.

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) framework builds on this attached event by surfacing it as two different common language runtime (CLR) events on UIElement: PreviewMouseLeftButtonDown and PreviewMouseRightButtonDown. These implementations handle the underlying PreviewMouseDown event and read the arguments of the event to determine whether the left or right mouse button was involved. For three-button, there is no framework-level event support for the center button, and you should use the PreviewMouseDown event and check for the center button condition in the event arguments.

For routed events that relate to the mouse, be careful about how or when you mark them handled. Handling the event near the root and handling it by a child further toward the source may not be appropriate for composited controls, where the compositing pieces might have expected mouse behaviors. The difficulty in making the appropriate choices about whether other elements should also be informed about any given mouse action is in fact why the WPF framework chose the model of having the underlying Mouse routed event be surfaced as CLR events along the route.

Routed Event Information

Identifier field PreviewMouseDownEvent
Routing strategy Tunneling
Delegate MouseButtonEventHandler
  • The corresponding bubbling event is MouseDown.

Applies to