ToolStrip On A Databound Form - Toolstrip Buttons Don't Receive Focus In The Normal Way ?

I really want to make use of the toolstrip and databinding but these two technologies keep conflicting with each other. I think the root cause is something to with the fact that the toolstrip buttons don't recieve focus in the normal way.

I invite you to try the following:-

1. Create a form and put some text boxes a tool strip with a save button on it.

2. Write a query or sproc to get a datatable back and bind your text boxes to the field in the datatable.

3. In the code behind your Save ToolStripButton put some code that makes an arbitrary change to a field on the dataset (it doesn't matter whther this field is bound to a text box or not). eg:-
m_DataTable.Rows(0).Item("CommissionRatePerc") = "0.0000"

4. Put a breakpoint in the save and run the form.

5. Make some changes in the text boxes. Do not leave the last text box but rather click save while a text box whose contents you have edited still has focus.

6. When your code hits the breakpoint, query the value of the data table field that is bound to the text box you were editing when you clicked save - it will still contain the unedited value. Unless you do something about it that unedited value is going to get saved back to your DB.

We did get around this problem by explicetely setting the focus to another control on the form before saving. That worked most of the time because it prompts the text box to flush it's value back to the datatable (nb EndEdit does not work, although you'd have expected it to). However, and this is the reason I suggested you add a line of code that changed a value in the underlying datatable in step 3, if you change a value in code in this way before the value from the text box get's flushed back then it doesn't seem to matter what you do, the user's current edit is simply lost. They will still show in the text box, though, leading your user to believe that the change has been committed when it hasn't. Our final solution is that we never ever change a value in the adtaset in the code behind our toolstrip buttons. That's working but it's a pretty big restriction.