Android: show soft keyboard automatically when focus is on an EditText

Question

I'm showing an input box using AlertDialog. The EditText inside the dialog itself is automatically focused when I call AlertDialog.show(), but the soft keyboard is not automatically shown.

How do I make the soft keyboard automatically show when the dialog is shown? (and there is no physical/hardware keyboard). Similar to how when I press the Search button to invoke the global search, the soft keyboard is automatically shown.

Answer 1

Take a look at this discussion which handles manually hiding and showing the IME. However, my feeling is that if a focused EditText is not bringing the IME up it is because you are calling AlertDialog.show() in your OnCreate() or some other method which is evoked before the screen is actually presented. Moving it to OnPostResume() should fix it in that case I believe.

Answer 2

You can create a focus listener on the EditText on the AlertDialog, then get the AlertDialog's Window. From there you can make the soft keyboard show by calling setSoftInputMode.

final AlertDialog dialog = ...;

editText.setOnFocusChangeListener(new View.OnFocusChangeListener() {
    @Override
    public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
        if (hasFocus) {
            dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);
        }
    }
});