How to check visibility of software keyboard in Android?

Question

I need to do a very simple thing - find out if the software keyboard is shown. Is this possible in Android?

Answer 1

I was having difficulty maintaining keyboard state when changing orientation of fragments within a viewpager. I'm not sure why, but it just seems to be wonky and acts differently from a standard Activity.

To maintain keyboard state in this case, first you should add android:windowSoftInputMode = "stateUnchanged" to your AndroidManifest.xml. You may notice, though, that this doesn't actually solve the entire problem -- the keyboard didn't open for me if it was previously opened before orientation change. In all other cases, the behavior seemed to be correct.

Then, we need to implement one of the solutions mentioned here. The cleanest one I found was George Maisuradze's--use the boolean callback from hideSoftInputFromWindow:

InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager) getSystemService(Activity.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
return imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(mViewPager.getWindowToken(), 0);

I stored this value in my Fragment's onSaveInstanceState method and retrieved it onCreate. Then, I forcibly showed the keyboard in onCreateView if it had a value of true (it returns true if the keyboard is visible before actually hiding it prior to the Fragment destruction).