Question

I have an EditText View which is edited by setText() from my code and by the user via (soft/hard) keyboard and – if possible by speech input. I want to handle input made by my code in another way than normal user input: if a user input happens, a internal event shall be fired. But I don’t know how to differentiate between both. Previously – when developing on the emulator – I used the onKeyDown() method to catch user input. However, when testing on a real device, I found out, that onKeyDown() isn’t triggered from soft keyboard input. Additionally speech input wouldn’t be recognized by this, though I consider this to be a minor flaw. So that solution is no option for me.

On the other hand there is the onTextChanged() method, but this is triggered by both setText() and keyboard input. So how can I differentiate between both or which method is only called by user input, but not when using setText(), so can I overwrite it?

Answer 1

I finally solved the problem by implementing a InputConnectionWrapper (see this question and particularly the answer for an implementation example) which has various methods to get the input from a soft-keyboard. I return my InputConnectionWrapper in the method EditText.onCreateInputConnection(). For hard keyboards I use EditText.onPreIme(). All these methods are overwritten and route their input through my framework which handles the text input and updates the View accordingly. This means, in all these overwritten methods (except for onCreateInputConnection()) the super method is not called cause I update the View myself. This prevents inconsistencies between my data model and the View.