Keyboard shortcuts for panels in Unified Service Desk

Unified Service Desk now lets you cycle through all the active panels using a predefined keyboard shortcut and also define keyboard shortcuts to directly access individual panels in the panel layout.

Keyboard shortcut to traverse through panels

Use the Ctrl+0 (default) keyboard shortcut to cyclically traverse through all the active panels in the Unified Service Desk client. To change the default shortcut key, use the PanelNavigationShortcut UII option to specify shortcut keys of your choice. More information: Manage Options for Unified Service Desk

Some key points to consider while using the shortcut key to traverse through panels are:

• The standard order of traversal is left to right and top to bottom.

• You cannot traverse to any visible panel that has no actionable control inside it.

• You cannot traverse to any hidden panels on the layout, like the ones inside a collapsed expander panel.

• You cannot traverse to a panel that has the Focusable attribute set to False.

Assign keyboard shortcut to panel

Assigning keyboard shortcuts to panels in a Unified Service Desk panel layout helps customer service agents directly navigate to a panel in the client application by using keyboard. You can assign keyboard shortcut to a panel in a custom panel layout by using the USD:PanelNavigation.KeyboardShortcut attribute in the panel element definition of the panel layout XAML.

You must also set the Focusable attribute to True in the panel element definition for which you are defining the shortcut. Otherwise, you won't be able to access the panel using the assigned keyboard shortcut even after defining it in the panel layout XAML.

The following example demonstrates how to assign the Ctrl+8 keyboard shortcut to the right panel in your Unified Service Desk custom panel layout XAML definition:

<USD:USDTabPanel x:Name="RightPanel"  
                 AutomationProperties.Name="Right Panel"  
                 Grid.Row="0"  
                 USD:PanelNavigation.KeyboardShortcut="Ctrl+8"  
                 Focusable="True"/>  

Things to consider while using keyboard shortcut for panel

Any key combination that is used by Internet Explorer (for example Ctrl+S) or general Windows operations (such as Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) can cause conflicts with keyboard shortcuts that you assign to Unified Service Desk panels.

Therefore, as a developer or customizer, the foremost thing is to identify and assign keyboard shortcuts to panels that do not conflict with Internet Explorer or Windows. Also, ensure that you do not assign duplicate keyboard shortcut to panels that conflict within Unified Service Desk. In case of a duplicate keyboard shortcut, Unified Service Desk will set the keyboard shortcut for the panel as the active shortcut key that was registered earlier during the execution sequence. Further, information about duplicate shortcut key is logged in the UnifiedSeviceDesk.log file (typically available at c:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Service Desk\<Version>), which can be used by developers and customizers to resolve the duplicate keyboard shortcut issue in the Unified Service Desk configuration.

Even after assigning non-conflicting keyboard shortcuts to your panels, the shortcut will not work if the current focus is on a control in the Unified Service Desk client that is hosted as a IE Process control because the focus is in a different process. However, this issue is not applicable to controls hosted using the Internal WPF control.

The workaround is to inform your Unified Service Desk client users, if you use the IE Process hosting for your controls, to use the CTRL+UP ARROW keyboard shortcut to move the focus from a IE Process hosted control to the main window before using the desired panel keyboard shortcut key to ensure that Unified Service Desk honors the shortcut.

See also

Panels, panel types, and panel layouts in Unified Service Desk
Create a custom panel layout