Hard keyboard Fail to focus editText

Question

I have a common EditText. It\'s very strange because I can\'t focus it when use hard keyboard. Context condition:

1. switch Droid\'s hardkeyboard on
2. star

Answer 1

As mentioned above this is clearly a bug with hard keyboard. If you have an EditText and a TabHost in your layout, on first key pressed, EditText lose focus and key press is sent to the activity instead. Here is a work around to this problem. Implement this in your activity.

@Override

public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event){

    final EditText myInputField = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.MyInputEditText);
    // this will happen on first key pressed on hard-keyboard only. Once myInputField 
    // gets the focus again, it will automatically receive further key presses.
    if (!myInputField.hasFocus()){ 
        myInputField.requestFocus();
        myInputField.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
    }
    return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

if you have multiple EditText fields, you will need to keep track of currently focused EditText in a class variable and use it in onKeyDown method.

Answer 2

I have the same problem. I kinda agree with Jay. Typically TabHost, and/or TabActivity utilize a LocalActivityManager that keeps track of embedded Activities or appropriate ContentStrategy component that is displayed within the FrameLayout element. In simple words, this is a typical embedded Activities/ embedded Views layout problem. The Edit Text is on the top-most Activity/View that is taking the touch-screen space, while there's a core Activity that is actually hosting this Activity/View that probably is grabbing the InputMethodService focus and keeping it away from the Edit Text, only for the hard-keyboard scenario. The soft-keyboard just works fine.

One change I did to my Edit Text is to change the InputType as purely decimal. So when the Edit Text gains focus, the soft keyboard shows a numeric key-pad and not the alphabetical qwerty key-pad. I ran it on a Motorla Droid Pro emulator, that I updated in Eclipse Plugins from the Motodev website. Apparently, when I try to enter text from the hard keyboard after having given focus for the Edit Text (and the soft-keyboard is showing a numeric key-pad), after I click 'ALT + 2', the soft-keyboard is reloaded as alphabetic key-pad while the Edit Text loses focus entirely.

Seems like a serious bug to me in the Froyo release, insufficient support for hard-keyboard devices for edit text views in layouts (LinearLayout) that are embedded in other layouts (FrameLayout of a TabHost).