Why is Android WebView refusing user input?

Question

I\'m developing an Android application that uses a WebView to display the login page for Facebook. The page loads beautifully, and I\'m able to select the username/password

Answer 1

I found a problem that might be different, but it sounds similar. In the android 2.3 native browser, if you have fixed position elements on the page, it sometimes breaks select boxes.

A workaround for this problem for 2.3 devices is to never allow empty child elements for a fixed position parent. Thus,

<div style="position:fixed">
  <div>
    <span>not empty</span>
    <span></span>
  </div>
</div>

would become

<div style="position:fixed">
  <div>
    <span>not empty</span>
    <span>&nbsp;</span>
  </div>
</div>

This fixed my problem.

Don't know if this was the issue for your problem, and this is over a year after-the-fact, but figured I would share, as I'm currently dealing with another fixed postion issue on an app, and I haven't found a workaround for it.

Answer 2

It was happened to me loading a page in 4.1.2 and 4.2.2 and after one day of searching, I found the answer here (comment #18)

Quote from the original post:

Some of the various web pages I was rendering with WebView didn't fit properly into the WebView and as a result a div (or some other html component ) were being invisibly laid over the input fields. Although the input fields appeared selected when touched, they would not allow text input (even if i did manage to get the soft keyboard up using the track ball).

So the solution.

webview.getSettings().setUseWideViewPort(true);

This won't completely stop the issue, but makes the view more like a PC browser which sites are designed for. Less change of the overlay.

Answer 3

@Mac Does this single line :

webView.requestFocus(View.FOCUS_DOWN);

solved your problem ? I didn't in my case ,but this does :

mWebView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() { 
@Override
public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
           switch (event.getAction()) { 
               case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN: 
               case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP: 
                   if (!v.hasFocus()) { 
                       v.requestFocus(); 
                   } 
                   break; 
           } 
           return false; 
        }
});

just for your referrence.

Answer 4

In my case TabHost from a previous fragment in back stack was stealing the focus from WebView input on every key press. Here's how I fixed it:

tabHost.addOnAttachStateChangeListener(new OnAttachStateChangeListener() {
  @Override
  public void onViewDetachedFromWindow(View v) {}

  @Override
  public void onViewAttachedToWindow(View v) {
    tabHost.getViewTreeObserver().removeOnTouchModeChangeListener(tabHost);
  }
});

See https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2516 for more on the topic.

Answer 5

I tried all the other solutions posted here, none of which worked.

Instead, I extended the WebView and overrode the InputConnection which forced KeyEvents to dispatch.

@Override
public InputConnection onCreateInputConnection(EditorInfo outAttrs) {
  return new BaseInputConnection(this, false);
}

Answer 6

I spend a lot of time to solve this problem. Finally, I realized that it is not about WebView. In my case, I have a webview inside dialog. I want to handle back pressed button to cancel dialog and finish activity as well. And I wrote code below:

private void setOnBackPressed() {
    this.setOnKeyListener(new OnKeyListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onKey(DialogInterface dialog, int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
            if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_BACK) {
                dialog.dismiss();
                activity.finish();
            }
            return true;
        }
    });
}

So, when I use the keyboard, this method reject all key presses somehow and then it doesn't appear on the text fields.

I only changed the return value to false. So, it worked properly.

Hope it helps!!

PS: this method is inside my dialog class that extends Dialog class