Question

I have an edittext which is created programmatically (so not in xml) and I want to launch a numeric keyboard when user presses it. The problem is that I want this keyboard also to contain the decimal separator (.).

I tried many things but nothing seems to work

final EditText input = new EditText(this);

input.setKeyListener(new DigitsKeyListener()); // this gives numeric without decimal separator
input.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_NUMBER); // this gives numeric without decimal separator
input.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_PHONE);//this gives phone keyboard with all the digits and decimal separator in the second page. It is not exactly what I want

I know that there is a way to implement custom keyboard:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/creating-input-method.html

http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/SoftKeyboard/index.html

but it seems quite a pain and I am first looking for a quicker alternative.

All I want is one of the following:
1. Launch numeric keyboard that contains decimal separator
2. Launch standard keyboard, but set in the numeric “page”
Is something of the above possible? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

There is no keyboard for what you are describing, at least not one that you can get as a normal input type. Even if you made a custom keyboard, that wouldn’t be a good way of handling this because the user would have to switch keyboards every time they wanted to use your app.

Also, you can’t explicitly open the text keyboard “on the number page” because not all Android keyboards even have a separate number page. This is highly customized on each device.

My first suggestion would be to use the normal text keyboard, and let the user decide which keyboard suits the best.

My second suggestion would be to build a number pad on the screen using buttons/views for the specific keys you need.