jQuery: How to capture the TAB keypress within a Textbox

Question

I want to capture the TAB keypress, cancel the default action and call my own javascript function.

Answer 1

An important part of using a key down on tab is knowing that tab will always try to do something already, don't forget to "return false" at the end.

Here is what I did. I have a function that runs on .blur and a function that swaps where my form focus is. Basically it adds an input to the end of the form and goes there while running calculations on blur.

$(this).children('input[type=text]').blur(timeEntered).keydown(function (e) {
        var code = e.keyCode || e.which;
        if (code == "9") {
            window.tabPressed = true;
            // Here is the external function you want to call, let your external
            // function handle all your custom code, then return false to
            // prevent the tab button from doing whatever it would naturally do.
            focusShift($(this));
            return false;
        } else {
            window.tabPressed = false;
        }
        // This is the code i want to execute, it might be different than yours
        function focusShift(trigger) {
            var focalPoint = false;
            if (tabPressed == true) {
                console.log($(trigger).parents("td").next("td"));
                focalPoint = $(trigger).parents("td").next("td");

            }
            if (focalPoint) {
                $(focalPoint).trigger("click");
            }
        }
    });