Question

In Corona SDK, I’m looking for an example/tutorial of something that seems like it should be incredibly basic: including a text input field within a scrollview.

I have been using widget.newScrollView() for the scrollview, and native.newTextField() for the text input field. The problem, of course, is that the “native” objects exist outside the Corona display object hierarchy, so the textfield can’t be placed inside the scrollview and scrolled that way.

A comment on this Corona Labs blog post suggests the technique of using a placeholder image that looks like a textfield, with a touch listener that overlays the real textfield when the user touches it. Is that the best approach to take?

Answer 1

“Faking it” is a proven method of getting stuff done when programming, whether you’re using Corona SDK or anything else. While it’s nice not to have to jump through hoops to get something done, sometimes it’s just the best way to handle it.

In this case, I think using a placeholder is probably the best way to go. You could create a function that uses display.newRect to create the frame of the fake textfield and then display.newText to put in the default and/or user-supplied text.

Something like:

local dObj = showFauxTextfield(x, y, width, height, str)

Create the rect and text according to the parameters passed in, put them into a display group, and pass that back to the calling code. You can then put that into your regular display group along with everything else.

Inside showFauxTextfield() you’ll create an event handler that pops up a native.newTextField when it’s touched.

It’s a little extra work, but Corona typically saves you a lot of dev time anyway, so you’ll probably still come out ahead. 😉