First of all, I am aware of about 1000 other questions regarding the android keyboard... I am aware I can manually hide keyboard from window or control, and pass in any number of flags that are supposed to control where and when keyboard pops up.
Basically, I aim to have PREDICTABLE keyboard handling in my app... that is that unless explicitly told to focus this control, and popup keyboard, it'll only pop up when a user taps a text edit.
This app is extensive, and manually attempting to hide keyboard from even just the focused control (vs explicitly hiding each and every edit field).
I am also aware I can avoid the popup up keyboard when you dont want it there, by setting focus on a non text editable field, however, that seems like more of a hack than anything else.
So my question is... is there a way to just force app to never auto pop up keyboard on new dialogs, fragments etc... app wide? If I want this text field to et focus on new dialog, I'll manually handle those cases. In addition, any way to automatically handle keyboard dissapear when the previously focused control dissapears?
I just dont get logic there... if I step back and think about this, I'd only want keyboard popping up if I wanted to go type something. As far as keyboard popping up immediately when new dialog opens... seems like the exceptional case (there may be a couple times I'd want to do that).
I dont mind building a manager or something that keeps track of the state of keyboard, however i dont know if I can get at the information I'd need to make it work in a remotely intuitive manner, efficiently.
Any pointers or ideas would be greatly appreciated... because I am at my whits end with this... and I can assure you I've spent a good deal of time researching this and attempting fixes.
Note: Sorry about the title or hostility... I've fought this for quite some time, and been generally infuriated with how bizarre dealing with the keyboard can be.
So my question is... is there a way to just force app to never auto pop up keyboard on new dialogs, fragments etc... app wide?
No.
But you can use:
this.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_HIDDEN);
On each activity.
Ok, I think I get what you're asking. Have a look at the second answer here:
Stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup
You can specify in your AndroidManifest.xml whether or not the softkeyboard should be hidden by adding this android:windowSoftInputMode="stateHidden" to the beginning of your activities tag (<activity>)
Related
As many do , I ran into the problem of the softinput covering my send buttons so I did some searching and found the accepted way of fixing this issue is "android:windowSoftInputMode="stateAlwaysHidden|adjustPan"
and this works great on my device, but when I try it on my girlfriends phone it doesnt work. I see the dialog lift a little before the input shows up on screen , but not much and the send button is still covered. Why would this work on some devices , but not all?
Messing with the onscreen keyboard is difficult at best because on the one hand:
It's supposed to be where it is, that way users expect it, it's consistent, very important in UI design
BUT
It can get in the way.
The solution (based on the Android design guidelines, experience and feedback and so forth) is not to faff with it too much, you can have basically the following kinds of behavior:
*Pops up when activity starts (which happens if the activity has an input)
*Doesn't pop up when activity starts (despite the first input having focus <-- good) but will when the user taps.
It's good to dismiss the keyboard when the user is done, that is have the "enter button" take them to the next entry, if there's none left, hide it, if it's some sort of data capture form that validate as they go along, if not don't do this because they might press back in an attempt to get it up.
Addendum I
"adjustResize"
The activity's main window is always resized to make room for the soft keyboard on screen.
"adjustPan"
The activity's main window is not resized to make room for the soft keyboard. Rather, the contents of the window are automatically panned so that the current focus is never obscured by the keyboard and users can always see what they are typing. This is generally less desirable than resizing, because the user may need to close the soft keyboard to get at and interact with obscured parts of the window.
From the documentation here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html
Difference between adjustResize and adjustPan in android?
See there for more.
It's difficult to pan correctly because the layout of the activity can be many things, it could scroll to the left, it could all be relative, it's not one strip where it need only jump up and down, some things also have more than one solution, more than one way to pan so it is visible. You haven't really described what doesn't work btw. I'm trying to explain the issues of what I think you want.
Does this help?
Suddenly got here. You shouldn't mix several values inside android:windowSoftInputMode="" attribute. So, you can preserve android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustPan" and hide a keyboard with hideKeyboard() (look for this method in the Net). Probably you can add listeners to hide it everywhere inside the activity.
I'm writing an app using Titanium. I want to be able to automatically dismiss the keyboard anytime something outside of the text field is clicked. I have yet to find an elegant solution for this issue.
Couple things that I've thought about, but am still looking for a better solution:
Assign event listeners to basically everything else present in the view, and dismiss the keyboard (using textField.blur()). I want to avoid this since it results in a LOT of code just to dismiss the keyboard. Also, if I end up adding anything else to the view, I'll have to add a click listener to that object as well, so it's not very maintainable.
Create a large transparent view, and have it take up the entire screen. Place it directly beneath the text field and add to it one click listener on that which will dismiss the keyboard. This is a better solution than #1, but still isn't great because I've had a lot of trouble getting zIndexes to work properly. It's also inefficient for my purposes because I've got views with a specific width and height that encapsulate text fields. I've used these for the sake of code simplicity and I re-use them throughout my application.
I've tried adding a listener for the "blur" event for the text field but that doesn't seem to get fired appropriately.
That's about it. I'm sort of at a loss. The zIndexing also behaves strangely on the iPhone, and I haven't tried on Android yet. Also, as I mentioned above, many of the text fields I use are encapsulated within small views with set widths/heights-- so I think that will affect the functionality of Z-indexes.
So the root question is: What's the best way to dismiss a keyboard whenever anything outside the text field that's in focus is clicked?
If I'm correct the click event propagates through all views and windows therefore your #1 option could be modified to check for clicks on the bottom most layer (view or window), check for its source then decide what to do.
I have an app that runs fullscreen by using:
getWindow().setFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN,WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_FULLSCREEN);
Because of this the layout, android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize" is not working properly, i.e. it dose not resize.
Is there any way to get over the problem?
FYI: This is an existing AOSP (Android Open Source Project) bug: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5497
Ideally this bug would be fixed, but until then here are a couple thoughts of how it could be worked around. Since I have no idea what application scenario this pertains to, these may not be very applicable.
In agreement with my best interpretation of the previous answer, design your layout so that adjustPan works ok with it. The first thing I can think of here is not having any headers or footers that are intended to remain on screen when the keyboard is up.
Don't use FLAG_FULLSCREEN with a layout that can accept text input. Possibly it wouldn't be a big deal to show the status bar when accepting input. However, for something that views content with embedded input fields (like a web browser) that has a fullscreen mode, this doesn't make much sense at all.
Implement adjustResize-like behavior of your own. I'm not sure how well this would work, but possibly you could write a subclass of whichever class is causing the keyboard to be shown (ex: EditText) where you either track when the keyboard is shown or take over the calls to show and hide the keyboard (overriding at least onKeyUp and onTouchEvent). When shown, resize your content - possibly with a best guess of the softinput height, since users can install different soft input methods. I believe this would be technically difficult and not reasonable to attempt without extreme need.
Instead of android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize" you can try with android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustPan"
I have a custom view for which I want the user to be able to enter characters from an app-defined set of characters. To do this, as I understand it, I need to write an input method service. The user not only needs to install it, but then needs to enable the IME in the Settings > Language & keyboard, and then select the custom IME for use in the view.
This seems really crazy. I want this IME to be used for just one view in one application. I don't want it to be available system-wide or force the user to make global setting changes.
The only alternative I can see is defining my own in-app custom view and simulate an IME (probably a full-screen one) when the view gains focus. Isn't there anything better?
I do not think the IMEs are conceived for that kind of task. Their concept is to allow user input in a standardized way so it can be used across multiple applications from different vendors.
My strategy would be similar to what you are thinking:
prevent the soft keyboard from appearing,
intercept the menu button key press to show your own instead,
add a custom layout (probably a GridView or a TableView inside a RelativeLayout with bottom gravity)
use an OnItemClickListener
send the required KeyEvents to the root View. If the characters are invented, the KeyCodes do not even need to relate to the ASCII character. You just intercept the code and use at will.
Sorry I can't give you an option as you asked, but this alternative does not seem to be much more work than creating a whole new IME.
Edit: upon reading the related question, it makes sense to use android.inputmethodservice.KeyboardView instead of reinventing the wheel with the GridView.
I recently wrote my first app for android, and I created a listview for selecting an element from a list of about 500 items. Since it's basically the default listview, it's searchable, and I can bring up the onscreen keyboard by holding down the menu button, but I was wondering if there was a way to bring up the keyboard automatically (and not make it freak out if the phone has a physical keyboard). Does anyone know how I can do this? I've been searching around and haven't found anything.
Add this to your xml activity list definition (AndroidManifest.xml)
android:windowSoftInputMode="stateAlwaysVisible|adjustResize"
Maybe not exactly what you want, nevertheless; you could add a EditText above your list. When this EditText gets focus (which it will by default when you show your activity, presuming it's the first GUI component on the layout) it will also automatically trigger the software keyboard.
The neat thing of this approach is that it gets even more intuitive for the user that he or she can actually search the list by entering a search criteria.