Forcing the Soft Keyboard open

Question

I am trying to force the Soft Keyboard open in an Activity and grab everything that is entered as I want to handle the input myself, I don't have an EditText. Currently I have tried this but it does not work. I would like the Soft Keyboardto open below mAnswerTextView (Note: it is a TextView not EditText).

    InputMethodManager mgr = (InputMethodManager) getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
    // only will trigger it if no physical keyboard is open
    mgr.showSoftInput(mAnswerTextView, InputMethodManager.SHOW_IMPLICIT);

1. how do I force the Soft Keyboard open
2. How do I gab everything that is entered so that I can handle each character. I would like to flush each character from the Soft Keyboard after I have handled it. ie, the user should not be able to enter whole words in the Soft Keyboard.

Answer 1

You'll probably need to have an editable text area of some kind to take focus. You can probably have one invisible or on a transparent background with no cursor, though. You may need to toy around with the focusability settings for the view.

Use a TextWatcher to check for edits to that EditText with addTextChangedListener, or if you need an even-lower-level hook, set the textview's key listener with its setOnKeyListener() method. See the KeyListener documentation.

Use this call to force the soft keyboard open:

((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE))
    .showSoftInput(myEditText, InputMethodManager.SHOW_FORCED);

and this one to close it:

((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE))
    .hideSoftInputFromWindow(myEditText.getWindowToken(), 0);

note that this is really not recommended - forcing the keyboard open is kind of messy. What's your use case that really necessitates your taking user input without a normal edit box and requires eating user input on a key-by-key basis without echoing it back?