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 often has this problem when my apps handle orientation change.

In that case I use the following kind of code:

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    ...
    // to avoid the scrollview to scroll to this element automatically
    mEditTextSearch.setFocusable(false);
    // Get the saved scroll position
    final int scrolly = savedInstanceState.getInt("scrolly");
    mScrollView.post(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            mScrollView.scrollTo(0, scrolly);
            // Restore the initial state of the EditText
            mEditTextSearch.setFocusable(true);
            mEditTextSearch.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
            mEditTextSearch.setClickable(true);
        }
    });
    ...
}

Answer 2

Only this code works for me:

public static void preventScrollViewFromScrollingToEdiText(ScrollView view) {
    view.setDescendantFocusability(ViewGroup.FOCUS_BEFORE_DESCENDANTS);
    view.setFocusable(true);
    view.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
    view.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            v.requestFocusFromTouch();
            return false;
        }
    });
}

All credits go to this original answer.