Android WebView refusing user input

Question

Hi all.

I'm developing an Android application that uses a WebView to display the login page for Facebook. The page loads beautifully, and I'm able to select the username/password textboxes, but typing in them will not work. That is, they definitely have input focus (they have the orange focus highlight box and a flashing cursor), but typing in them does absolutely nothing. I'm not certain, but I think maybe the form buttons are also playing up - they appear to be simply refreshing the page, rather than submitting the form.

Just to be clear, although I'm particularly interested in getting Facebook running, I'm sure that this isn't a Facebook issue since other websites (Google, etc) also display the same behaviour.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be the issue?

Thanks!

Mac.

Answer 1

Not sure if it's the problem since other websites also display the same behavior, but have you enabled javascript? A WebView does not enable it by default.

WebView webView = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.yourWebView);
webView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);

Answer 2

Turns out that it was apparently the WebView not having focus that was the issue.

I discovered that using the arrow keys to get focus on the textboxes caused them to work, so I theorised that there was an issue somewhere with something not having focus, most likely the WebView not having focus. Sure enough, adding the following line seemed to fix the problem:

webView.requestFocus(View.FOCUS_DOWN);

I'm still at a loss to explain exactly why the issue occurred in the first place - the textboxes should work whether they receive focus from being tapped upon or through being "arrowed" to - but at least I have a solution that appears to work.

Thanks for your input wf.

Answer 3

I encountered this problem because I am displaying a splash image while the webview is loading the first page. I am setting the webview to View.VISIBLE in onPageFinished, however despite being able to focus text boxes you can't type into them. I too can confirm that the fix to set the webview requestFocus to View.FOCUS_DOWN works.

NB. If I set the webview to View.VISIBLE in onResume the problem does not present itself but in my case the splash image disapears too soon.

Answer 4

@Mac Does this single line :

webView.requestFocus(View.FOCUS_DOWN);

solved your problem ? I didn't in my case ,but this does :

mWebView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() { 
@Override
public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
           switch (event.getAction()) { 
               case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN: 
               case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP: 
                   if (!v.hasFocus()) { 
                       v.requestFocus(); 
                   } 
                   break; 
           } 
           return false; 
        }
});

just for your referrence.