How to capture Ctrl-A, Ctrl-Z

Question

Hi I'm trying to build a flash application, and having
trouble capturing key combinations such as Ctrl+A or Ctrl+Z.
I'm doing stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN,
keyDownHandler)
and keyDownHandler checks event.ctrlKey and event.keyCode.
Ctrl+Y works, but most of other Ctrl + Key combinations don't
work, I think because those key strokes are
captured in Flash Player / Browser before captured by AS3.
Does anyone know good solutions?

Answer 1

for what it's worth, i spent a couple of intensive weeks
developing a solution for a flash .swf embedded in a browser page
to do exactly the kinds of things you are asking about, trapping
all those "special" keys where the browser seems to intercept them
and act differently, and Flash never gets to trap or respond to
them. Things like F1, F5, F11, CTRL+N, and so on. The answer was
that there was no good flash way to do this. But what I found was
that in Javascript (at least in IE) I was able to trap all those
events through various different methods, but ONLY if the document
and NOT the flash had the window focus. So, the archaic, ugly
solution I came up with involved making sure that the flash object
actually never got the focus (with an onfocus="this.blur();"
approach) and then setting up an elaborate system where I could
trap all events in Javascript, filter them as appropriate, and then
pass into Flash only those "events" that I wanted to let it
process. Inside of Flash, using actionscript 3's new Event model, I
would then simulate those events according to the values passed in
to Flash from the javascript.
Basically, this is like tricking flash into thinking it has
focus, so that it tracks caret position in text fields,
highlighting selections, etc, but actually javascript stays in
control 99.999% of the time.
As you can imagine, there were LOTS of gotchas in all of
this, and a few places where I didn't even bother trying to figure
out how to get it to work cross-browser, though I think it's
possible with more effort/time.
One gotcha was that some events (such as Text Entry) could
not be properly simulated with an actual Flash event, so I had to
manually insert characters into text boxes at the appropriate
location based on the caret position that flash thought it had.
After all was said and done, this was so complicated and
tenuous that I basically basked in my glory of finding a solution
for only a few minutes before tearing it all apart and
re-architecting my solution from scratch. I pulled the text boxes
out of Flash and put them in HTML, and then connected the two via
events, etc. The end result looks and behaves the same, but is MUCH
less obfuscated and confusing, and probably a lot more likely to
remain functional down the line.