How to completely disable soft keyboard for all input in Android webview

Question

I am using phonegap to develop a web app for Android, and since I will have my own keypad in HTML, I need to disable android's system keyboard, preventing the it from showing up when the user clicks on any text input field. I don't want to use readonly input field or onblur() since I would like to have the cursor in the text filed so user can move the cursor position while they're entering inputs.

So I want to completely disable Android's keyboard on default, I tried adding android:windowSoftInputMode="stateAlwaysHidden" to manifest.xml but this does not work.

I also try use a javascript interface from here, but there was a javascript-java bridge crash issue on Android 2.3.x.(link to issue). So I still don't have a good solution now. Please help.

Thank in advance for any help.

Trail

Have you configured the WebView's WebViewClient and WebChromeClient? I worked on a project that used jQuery Mobile and we had to configure both of those for things to work properly. You may have to intercept a JS event and tie that into the Java logic in the native code. I'll look into this and keep you updated. – Schlenger

Thanks for the tips, but I think phonegap already configured both webviewclient and webchromeclient. I will look more into it. thanks – Trail

Okay, look into my suggestions below. It doesn't look like there's a pretty way to do this, but then again doing anything prettily in Android is near impossible in a lot of cases. – Schlenger

Answer 1

Okay, you've got a few options! You can try to disable the keyboard completely using:

• getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_HIDDEN);

  • If you choose this way, be sure to return the settings to normal if that's not done automatically. I haven't used this before and couldn't tell you how it behaves, but keep that in mind! You don't want a user to reply to a text they receive while using your app only to have their keyboard disabled :)

• You could use something similar to the following link. I haven't dug through it very thoroughly (tl;dr) but he creates a custom view that extends from android.inputmethodservice.KeyboardView and uses that instead.

  • https://mcmap.net/q/638902/-android-app-specific-soft-keyboard

• Lastly (I'm not sure how much this would differentiate from the first one) you could create your own IME.

  • How to develop a soft keyboard for Android?
  • http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/text/creating-input-method.html

Schlenger