Key press event triggers?

I want the escape key (or back button on an Android) to close my modal dialog window. Detecting the key press is the easy part. How do I send it to a UI element (or broadcast it to all UI elements) using the new event system?

 

you would not need to "Send" it to the UI.
Just have a script that references the GO for the modal window and use "SetActive" on it to hide/unhide it.

 

You can use Event Trigger https://unity3d.com/pt/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/ui/ui-events-and-event-triggers
Add Component > Event > Event Trigger

To send to all UI Element you have two ways : make an array or list and do for each element or (not recomended) use FindObjectOfType to create an list and send message through all.

 

Nooooo, Never use EventTriggers unless you really really have to. They are a last resort dynamic object.
Better to implement your own script using the Event Interfaces that you actually need for a GO, e.g. iPointerDownHandler for click events.

 

What I came up with was:
I've extended MonoBehaviour into a custom UIElementBase which catches and handles the escape key in Update, and then all my modal window classes inherit it instead of MonoBehaviour.

 

Thanks for this advice. I'll keep it in mind. However, I found that the only event interfaces Unity offers are for mouse/touch events and no keyboard events.

 

The events are just are what are currently exposed by the Input handlers. The standalone input handler does handle keyboard events. (a bit)
If you want to control the events for different inputs, then you need to write your own InputHandler

 

If I end up needing much more than just the escape key for modals, I'll start looking into custom Input Modules. It looks like Unity might even make theirs open source in the future, so that's nice.

 

Well all the current UI (and input modules) are already opensource of course
https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/ui