What to do when you push a key

I received an interesting email the other day asking about how to get the character code from the parameters passed to the ITfKeyEventSink::OnKeyDown method.

The answer is that most keyboard related text services only work with a particular keyboard layout, and the text service manages the mapping from virtual key codes to character codes.

It is actually surprisingly difficult to write a keyboard-related text service that is keyboard-layout agnostic, as there isn't a public API that exposes the details of the keyboard layout.

"What about ToAscii/ToUnicode (and the related APIs)", you say?  Well, unfortunately, those APIs don't actually work across all languages.  In particular, they don't deal well with dead keys and obscure shift states (AltGr, SGCAPS, etc.), and, of course, fail utterly with languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.  Michael Kaplan has an extensive set of articles about using ToUnicode (summarized here).

If you want to write a text service that is completely agnostic as to keyboard layouts, then, most likely, you probably don't want to use ITfKeyEventSink.  What can you use to monitor keyboard changes?

So far, the best recommendation I have is to use ITfTextEditSink::OnEndEdit, and if either of the following two conditions are true, then you can conclude that a keyboard made the changes: 

1) Call ITfEditRecord::GetTextAndPropertyUpdates to see if it contains a range with the property GUID_PROP_COMPOSING. TSF will set this property on text that is part of a composition.

2) Check if the context that you get from OnEndEdit has one or more ITfCompositionView objects within it.  Here's some sample code to demonstrate:

hr = pContext->QueryInterface(IID_ITfContextComposition,
                              (void **)&pContextComposition);
if (hr == S_OK)
{
    IEnumITfCompositionView *pEnumCompositionView;

    hr = pContextComposition->EnumCompositions(&pEnumCompositionView);
    if (hr == S_OK)
    {
        ITfCompositionView *pCompositionView;

        while (pEnumCompositionView->Next(1, &pCompositionView, NULL) == S_OK)
        {
            ITfRange *pRange;
            hr = pCompositionView->GetRange(&pRange);
            if (hr == S_OK)
            {
                // Do Stuff Here
                pRange->Release();
            }
            pCompositionView->Release();
        }
        pEnumCompositionView->Release();
    }
    pContextComposition->Release();
}