Question

I am developing an android application. I have an autocompleteTextView in my layout. I want to populate this textView with the suggestions from my server. There are around 400 keywords on the server and they will increase in near future so i can not parse all the tags at once and then check for suggestions. The autocompleteTextView should work more like as the google search, so that i parse only when the user typed in something and that parsing happens on UI thread.

But i am here not able to trigger that parser since i am not able to get that callback method or may be the event which senses that user has typed something or may be edited some text.

setOnEditorActionListener works only when the user presses the enter button on the soft keyboard.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can use the Filter interface to implement this as well. Turns out Filter.performFiltering() is called off the UI thread just for this type of purpose. Here is some code I use to do this:

        Filter filter = new Filter() {

        @Override
        public CharSequence convertResultToString(Object resultValue) {
            return resultValue.toString();
        }

        @Override
        protected FilterResults performFiltering(CharSequence charSequence) {
            if( charSequence == null ) return null;
            try {
                // This call hits the server with the name I'm looking for and parses the JSON returned for the first 25 results
                PagedResult results = searchByName( charSequence.toString(), 1, 25, true);
                FilterResults filterResults = new FilterResults();
                filterResults.values = results.getResults();
                filterResults.count = results.getResults().size();
                return filterResults;
            } catch (JSONException e) {
                return new FilterResults();
            }
        }

        @Override
        protected void publishResults(CharSequence charSequence, FilterResults filterResults) {
            if( filterResults != null ) {
                adapter.clear();
                adapter.addAll( (List<MyObject>)filterResults.values );
            }
        }
    };

Then using the Filter:

    private AutoCompleteTextView beverageName;
    ...

    beverageName = findViewById( R.id.beverageName );
    ListAdapter adapter = ...
    adapter.setFilter(filter);
    beverageName.setAdapter(adapter);