Force Focus on AutoCompleteBox from Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone

Question

It's not possible to do a autocompletebox.Focus(), but there seems to be a work around : TextBox textBox = autoBox.Template.FindName("Text", autoBox) as TextBox;

However, there is no method FindName in Windows Phone. How can I work around this ?

Answer 1

Fetch the short chunk of source code from this blog about VisualTreeEnumeration. (Note the comment about Toolkit's own VisualTreeExtensions class doesn't apply the the WP7 toolkit).

Now you can retrieve the internal TextBox with:-

textBox = autoBox.Descendents().OfType<TextBox>().FirstOrDefault(t => t.Name == "Text");