Stop ScrollView from auto-scrolling to an EditText

Question

Seems to be a common problem without a great solution that I have found. Goal is to stop a ScrollView from auto-scrolling to an EditText (or any view for that matter) that has focus.

You have a bunch of views (Buttons, TextViews, etc) in an ScrollView, one of which is an EditText. Upon clicking say a Button within the ScrollView, the ScrollView scrolls down to the EditText (its off screen). This is not desired, as there are other elements that you don't want scrolled off the screen.

Now I can stop this from happening when the screen first shows by having other focusable elements in the ScrollView. However, the general problem still exists. The user scrolls down manually to the EditText, enters some numbers, then scrolls up to the top (EditText off screen now), they click a button in the ScrollView, and guess what? The ScrollView scrolls down to that darn EditText.

I'm thinking about extending the ScrollView and overriding some of the methods there like findFocusableViewInBounds, but I have a feeling I'll just be getting myself into more trouble.

Please help if you can.

I've played around with things like having an 0 height EditText at the top of my ScrollView, adding Next Focusable element properties to the other items in the ScrollView, etc. I suppose one "hack" might be to get the EditText to lose focus when the virtual or manual keyboard gets hidden or something.

Answer 1

I was having a similar problem and finally got it to work. My scroll view contains a series of customized buttons, followed by an EditText (which normally has focus, but I don't want it to be losing focus). Any time the buttons were clicked, the scroll view auto-scrolled to the focused EditText. Overriding public boolean requestChildRectangleOnScreen(final View child, final Rect rectangle, final boolean immediate) and always returning false (default behavior of a ViewGroup) did the trick. Hope it helps with your situation too.

Answer 2

By adding 2 parameters in:

android:focusable="true"
android:focusableInTouchMode="true"

In which Main layout is there.

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:id="@+id/layMain"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:background="@color/background"
    android:focusable="true"
    android:focusableInTouchMode="true">

By this EditText will not be auto focused.

Answer 3

My fix to this most horrific bug, (worth noting that this is pre API11 only where they modified the fling method not to be stupid).

The old fling method finds the next focus that it will get to.. which isn't really that helpful. Other versions of this class don't really work as they stop focus working when the user genuinely traverses the form from the keyboard.

public class NonFocusingScrollView extends ScrollView {

    private boolean mBlockRequestFocusOnFling = false;

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

    public NonFocusingScrollView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    public NonFocusingScrollView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
    }

    @Override
    public ArrayList<View> getFocusables(int direction) {
        if(mBlockRequestFocusOnFling)
            return new ArrayList<View>();
        return super.getFocusables(direction);
    }

    @Override
    public void requestChildFocus(View child, View focused) {
        if(!mBlockRequestFocusOnFling)
        super.requestChildFocus(child, focused);
    }


    @Override
    public void fling(int velocityY) {
        mBlockRequestFocusOnFling = true;
        super.fling(velocityY);
        mBlockRequestFocusOnFling = false;
    }
}

Answer 4

For me, it didn't work to override ScrollView onTouch. Also did not work android:descendantFocusability="beforeDescendants" android:focusableInTouchMode="true" This and another mentioned solutions only worked for the first time - only when EditText is not selected, but once you select it, scrollview autoscrolls again.

Because I was already written a code to hide a keyboard when touching other views, I just added two lines of code and it worked like a champ:

public static void setupUI(final Activity activity, final View view) {
    //view is the parent view in your layout
    OnTouchListener mTouchListener = new OnTouchListener() {
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            try {
                View vFocused = null;
                vFocused = activity.getCurrentFocus();

                if (vFocused != null) {
                    hideSoftKeyboard(activity, v);
                    if (vFocused instanceof EditText) {
                        vFocused.clearFocus();//this is the trick to avoid ScrollView autoscroll
                    }
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
            }
            return false;
        }
    };

    // Set up touch listener for non-text box views to hide keyboard.
    if (!(view instanceof EditText) && !(view instanceof ViewGroup)) {
        view.setOnTouchListener(mTouchListener);
    }

    // If a layout container, iterate over children and seed recursion.
    if (view instanceof ViewGroup) {
        view.setOnTouchListener(mTouchListener);
        for (int i = 0; i < ((ViewGroup) view).getChildCount(); i++) {
            View innerView = ((ViewGroup) view).getChildAt(i);
            setupUI(activity, innerView);
        }
    }
}
public static void hideSoftKeyboard(Context context, View v) {
    InputMethodManager inputMethodManager = (InputMethodManager) context
            .getSystemService(Activity.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
    inputMethodManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(v.getWindowToken(), 0);
}

also added this in root view:

android:descendantFocusability="beforeDescendants" android:focusableInTouchMode="true"

Maybe its not really nice solution, but its working.

Answer 5

thomas88wp answer, https://stackoverflow.com/a/6486348/528746 worked for me. But I had two problems: 1. When scrolling, I wanted to hide the keyboard
2. I had lots of EditText views and didn't want to write it for each one of them
(I do getActivity() since I'm writing this inside a Fragment and not an activity)

    ScrollView scroll = (ScrollView)view.findViewById(R.id.layout_scroll);
    scroll.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {

        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            // Check if the view with focus is EditText
            if (getActivity().getCurrentFocus() instanceof EditText)
            {
                EditText ed = (EditText)getActivity().getCurrentFocus();
                if (ed.hasFocus()) {

                    // Hide the keyboard
                    InputMethodManager inputManager = (InputMethodManager)
                            getActivity().getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE); 
                    inputManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(getActivity().getCurrentFocus().getWindowToken(),
                            InputMethodManager.HIDE_NOT_ALWAYS);
                    // Clear the focus
                    ed.clearFocus();
                }
            }
            return false;
        }

    });

Answer 6

Another version of thomas88wp's code:

ScrollView scroll = (ScrollView)getActivity().findViewById(R.id.scrollView_addNewBill);
    scroll.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View arg0, MotionEvent arg1) {        
            View focussedView = getCurrentFocus(); 
            if( focussedView != null ) focussedView.clearFocus();
                
            return false;
    }
});