Android: AutoCompleteTextView show suggestions when no text entered

Question

I am using AutoCompleteTextView, when the user clicks on it, I want to show suggestions even if it has no text - but setThreshold(0) works exactly

Answer 1

Here is my class InstantAutoComplete. It's something between AutoCompleteTextView and Spinner.

import android.content.Context;  
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.widget.AutoCompleteTextView;

public class InstantAutoComplete extends AutoCompleteTextView {

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context arg0, AttributeSet arg1) {
        super(arg0, arg1);
    }

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context arg0, AttributeSet arg1, int arg2) {
        super(arg0, arg1, arg2);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean enoughToFilter() {
        return true;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onFocusChanged(boolean focused, int direction,
            Rect previouslyFocusedRect) {
        super.onFocusChanged(focused, direction, previouslyFocusedRect);
        if (focused && getAdapter() != null) {
            performFiltering(getText(), 0);
        }
    }

}

Use it in your xml like this:

<your.namespace.InstantAutoComplete ... />

Answer 2

The adapter does not perform filtering initially.
When the filtering is not performed, the dropdown list is empty.
so you might have to get the filtering going initially.

To do so, you can invoke filter() after you finish adding the entries:

adapter.add("a1");
adapter.add("a2");
adapter.add("a3");
adapter.getFilter().filter(null);