Focusable EditText inside ListView

Question

I\'ve spent about 6 hours on this so far, and been hitting nothing but roadblocks. The general premise is that there is some row in a ListView (whether it\'s g

Answer 1

Sorry, answered my own question. It may not be the most correct or most elegant solution, but it works for me, and gives a pretty solid user experience. I looked into the code for ListView to see why the two behaviors are so different, and came across this from ListView.java:

    public void setItemsCanFocus(boolean itemsCanFocus) {
        mItemsCanFocus = itemsCanFocus;
        if (!itemsCanFocus) {
            setDescendantFocusability(ViewGroup.FOCUS_BLOCK_DESCENDANTS);
        }
    }

So, when calling setItemsCanFocus(false), it's also setting descendant focusability such that no child can get focus. This explains why I couldn't just toggle mItemsCanFocus in the ListView's OnItemSelectedListener -- because the ListView was then blocking focus to all children.

What I have now:

I use beforeDescendants because the selector will only be drawn when the ListView itself (not a child) has focus, so the default behavior needs to be that the ListView takes focus first and draws selectors.

Then in the OnItemSelectedListener, since I know which header view I want to override the selector (would take more work to dynamically determine if any given position contains a focusable view), I can change descendant focusability, and set focus on the EditText. And when I navigate out of that header, change it back it again.

public void onItemSelected(AdapterView listView, View view, int position, long id)
{
    if (position == 1)
    {
        // listView.setItemsCanFocus(true);

        // Use afterDescendants, because I don't want the ListView to steal focus
        listView.setDescendantFocusability(ViewGroup.FOCUS_AFTER_DESCENDANTS);
        myEditText.requestFocus();
    }
    else
    {
        if (!listView.isFocused())
        {
            // listView.setItemsCanFocus(false);

            // Use beforeDescendants so that the EditText doesn't re-take focus
            listView.setDescendantFocusability(ViewGroup.FOCUS_BEFORE_DESCENDANTS);
            listView.requestFocus();
        }
    }
}

public void onNothingSelected(AdapterView listView)
{
    // This happens when you start scrolling, so we need to prevent it from staying
    // in the afterDescendants mode if the EditText was focused 
    listView.setDescendantFocusability(ViewGroup.FOCUS_BEFORE_DESCENDANTS);
}

Note the commented-out setItemsCanFocus calls. With those calls, I got the correct behavior, but setItemsCanFocus(false) caused focus to jump from the EditText, to another widget outside of the ListView, back to the ListView and displayed the selector on the next selected item, and that jumping focus was distracting. Removing the ItemsCanFocus change, and just toggling descendant focusability got me the desired behavior. All items draw the selector as normal, but when getting to the row with the EditText, it focused on the text field instead. Then when continuing out of that EditText, it started drawing the selector again.