When a Tab is selected, it often makes a lot of sense to focus an element in the tab content, e.g. an input field. However, this is hardly possible. The following example does not work:


import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.application.Platform;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.control.Tab;
import javafx.scene.control.TabPane;
import javafx.scene.control.TextArea;
import javafx.stage.Stage;

public class FocusTabContent extends Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        launch(args);
    }

    @Override
    public void start(Stage stage) throws Exception {
        TabPane tabPane = new TabPane();
        Tab tab1 = createTab("tab1");
        Tab tab2 = createTab("tab2");
        tabPane.getTabs().addAll(tab1, tab2);
        stage.setScene(new Scene(tabPane));
        stage.show();
    }

    private Tab createTab(String text) {
        Tab tab = new Tab(text);
        TextArea textArea = new TextArea();
        tab.setContent(textArea);
        tab.selectedProperty().addListener(obs -> {
            if(tab.isSelected()) {
                textArea.requestFocus(); // does not work
                Platform.runLater(() -> textArea.requestFocus()); // neither does this
            }
        });
        return tab;
    }
}


There is a suggested solution that uses Timer/Timeline [1] and another one that listens to mouse events on TabPane (and hence does not work for Ctrl+Tab selection or selection through API) [2]. They are both just suboptimal hacks.

I think this functionality should be supported more directly. Maybe a boolean property `focusContent` on Tab would do, which would allow the user to control whether to transfer focus to Tab content when the Tab gets the focus.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/19046535/
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/15648609/