Question

I have an application that is just a surfaceview. All i do is draw stuff on the surfaceview and whatnot. So one functionality i want is if the user touches a corner of the surfaceview it shows the keyboard and then they can type into it. Note that there are no EditTexts or Textboxes in my app anywhere. How do i call the keyboard to pop up and then how do i get all the keys that the user is pressing? I don’t want the keys necessarily, i just want the string that they typed. How do i go about accomplishing this?

Answer 1

This is not a trivial task.

First of all, you’ll need to override the method onCreateInputConnection()

@Override 
public InputConnection onCreateInputConnection(EditorInfo outAttrs) { 
    return new MyInputConnection(this, surfaceView, false);    
}

Then you’ll have to implement this input connection class, deriving from BaseInputConnection.

class MyInputConnection extends BaseInputConnection{

    private MyActivity activity;

    public MyInputConnection(MyActivity activity, View targetView, boolean fullEditor)
    {
       super( targetView, fullEditor );
       mActivity = activity;
    }

    public boolean commitText(CharSequence text, int newCursorPosition){ 
        myActivity.drawText((String) text); 
        return true; 
    } 

There are more methods you’ll want to override (see the reference), but start by focusing on commitText(). DrawText() is a method that renders the text on your surface, you’ll have to come up with an implementation that suits your needs.