Android: show soft keyboard automatically when foc

Question

I'm showing an input box using AlertDialog. The EditText inside the dialog itself is automatically focused when I call AlertDialog.show(), but the soft keyboard is not automatically shown.

How do I make the soft keyboard automatically show when the dialog is shown? (and there is no physical/hardware keyboard). Similar to how when I press the Search button to invoke the global search, the soft keyboard is automatically shown.

Answer 1

This is bit tricky. I did in this way and it worked.

1.At first call to hide the soft Input from the window. This will hide the soft input if the soft keyboard is visible or do nothing if it is not.

2.Show your dialog

3.Then simply call to toggle soft input.

code:

InputMethodManager inputManager = (InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE); 
//hiding soft input
inputManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(findViewById(android.R.id.content).getWind‌​owToken(), 0);
//show dialog
yourDialog.show();
//toggle soft input
inputManager.toggleSoftInput(InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED,InputMethodManager.SHOW_IMPLICIT);

Answer 2

You can request a soft keyboard right after creating the dialog (test on SDK - r20)

// create dialog
final AlertDialog dialog = ...; 

// request keyboard   
dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode (WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);

Answer 3

Let me point some additional info to the solution of yuku, because I found it hard to get this working! How do I get the AlertDialog object from my AlertDialog.Builder? Well, it's the result of my alert.show() execution:

final AlertDialog.Builder alert = new AlertDialog.Builder(getActivity());
final EditText input = new EditText(getActivity());
alert.setView(input);

// do what you need, like setting positive and negative buttons...

final AlertDialog dialog = alert.show();

input.setOnFocusChangeListener(new OnFocusChangeListener() {
   @Override
   public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
      if(hasFocus) {
         dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);
      }
   }
});

Answer 4

The original question concerns Dialogs and my EditText is on a regular view. Anyhow, I suspect this should work for most of you too. So here's what works for me (the above suggested highest rated method did nothing for me). Here's a custom EditView that does this (subclassing is not necessary, but I found it convenient for my purposes as I wanted to also grab the focus when the view becomes visible).

This is actually largely the same as the tidbecks answer. I actually didn't notice his answer at all as it had zero up votes. Then I was about to just comment his post, but it would have been too long, so I ended doing this post anyways. tidbeck points out that he's unsure how it works with devices having keyboards. I can confirm that the behaviour seems to be exactly the same in either case. That being such that on portrait mode the software keyboard gets popped up and on landscape it doesn't. Having the physical keyboard slid out or not makes no difference on my phone.

Because, I personally found the behaviour a bit awkward I opted for using: InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED. This works as I wanted it to work. The keyboard becomes visible regardless of the orientation, however, at least on my device it doesn't pop up if the hardware keyboard has been slid out.

import android.app.Service;
import android.content.Context;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.inputmethod.InputMethodManager;
import android.widget.EditText;

public class BringOutTheSoftInputOnFocusEditTextView extends EditText {

    protected InputMethodManager inputMethodManager;

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

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

    public BringOutTheSoftInputOnFocusEditTextView(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init();
    }

    private void init() {
        this.inputMethodManager = (InputMethodManager)getContext().getSystemService(Service.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
        this.setOnFocusChangeListener(new View.OnFocusChangeListener() {
            @Override
            public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
                if (hasFocus) {
                    BringOutTheSoftInputOnFocusEditTextView.this.inputMethodManager.showSoftInput(BringOutTheSoftInputOnFocusEditTextView.this, InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED);
                }
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    protected void onVisibilityChanged(View changedView, int visibility) {
        super.onVisibilityChanged(changedView, visibility);
        if (visibility == View.VISIBLE) {
            BringOutTheSoftInputOnFocusEditTextView.this.requestFocus();
        }
    }

}

Answer 5

You can create a focus listener on the EditText on the AlertDialog, then get the AlertDialog's Window. From there you can make the soft keyboard show by calling setSoftInputMode.

final AlertDialog dialog = ...;

editText.setOnFocusChangeListener(new View.OnFocusChangeListener() {
    @Override
    public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
        if (hasFocus) {
            dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);
        }
    }
});

Answer 6

The problem seems to be that since the place where you enter text is hidden initially (or nested or something), AlertDialog is automatically setting the flag WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_ALT_FOCUSABLE_IM or WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_NOT_FOCUSABLE so that things don't trigger a soft input to show up.

The way that to fix this is to add the following:

(...)
// Create the dialog and show it
Dialog dialog = builder.create()
dialog.show();

// After show (this is important specially if you have a list, a pager or other view that uses a adapter), clear the flags and set the soft input mode
dialog.getWindow().clearFlags(WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_NOT_FOCUSABLE|WindowManager.LayoutParams.FLAG_ALT_FOCUSABLE_IM);
dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);