B4J Question why wont events fire

I am using a textfield. I use the designer to create the events, action and textchanged. when I run the code and put a break on the events they are never called. I am wanting when a user hits <enter> in the box after entering text, I want to validate the text. the action event seems like the right place to do this. What do I look for to figure out why these are not getting called?

i tried a simple app to test it out to make sure I am using it right, and I am able to get it to work, so it has to be the interaction with my other code. I am not sure if this is an issue but the form elements are in a layout file that are assigned to a tabpane layout.

thanks

Brad