MS Word VSTO Addin Find.Execute fires ContentControlOnEnter event - ms-word

Question

It seems that if Find.Execute finds a result inside a ContentControl, it will cause the ContentControlOnEnter and ContentControlOnExit events to fire. It's particularly annoying because the exit event fires even if the selection is still in the content control, so any code which sets the states of buttons dependent upon a content control being active will appear to be in the incorrect state.
Given a document containing a single content control with the word "test", and the following code:
// In setup
Application.ActiveDocument.ContentControlOnEnter += ActiveDocument_ContentControlOnEnter;
private void ActiveDocument_ContentControlOnEnter(Word.ContentControl ContentControl)
{
var selRange = _Application.Selection.Range;
_logger.Debug(m => m("Selection: {0}-{1}", selRange.Start, selRange.End));
}
//Later in another method
var finder = _Application.ActiveDocument.Range().Find;
_logger.Debug("Find.Execute start");
finder.Execute("test);
_logger.Debug("Find.Execute end");
The following gets logged:
38137 [VSTA_Main] DEBUG - Find.Execute start
38141 [VSTA_Main] DEBUG - Selection: 1-5
38149 [VSTA_Main] DEBUG - Find.Execute end
We have a lot of code that handles ContentControlOnEnter and ContentControlOnExit events, and having the find operation cause them to be called is really causing problems!
Is there any way to use Find.Execute without having it trigger these events? Failing that, is there a good way to distinguish between the Find-triggered ones and the genuine user ones? I have tried using the time between the enter and exit events, but this is not reliable.

Answer 1

I had similar problems in Word, though it was about the Selection event. I tried many solutions, but only one helped. In your case, make a new field bool _skipEnterAndExitEvents and set it true before calling
finder.Execute("test) and false after calling. And in the enter and exit event handlers check this field, if the field is true then just skip. This solutions is not beautiful, looks like a hack, but other solutions are even uglier and don't really work.

Answer 2

I think I found a decent solution:
private bool _doIgnoreNextExit = false;
private void ActiveDocument_ContentControlOnEnter(Word.ContentControl ContentControl)
{
if (Application.Selection.Find.Found)
{
_logger.Debug("Ignoring CC enter event caused by Find operation");
_doIgnoreNextExit = true;
return;
}
// Do things
}
private void ActiveDocument_ContentControlOnExit(Word.ContentControl ContentControl)
{
if(_doIgnoreNextExit)
{
_logger.Debug("Ignoring fake exit");
_doIgnoreNextExit = false;
return;
}
// Do things
}