Android soft keyboard

[jharris]

I am having the same issues on my Motorola Atrix. Hope they get this fixed soon.

[SparkOut]

It's been confirmed and will be fixed in the next release.

[BarrySumpter]

Another nice one.

Who writes this stuff?

[ronbird]

Hello all
I'm trying to get the android keyboard to show the search magnifying glass instead of the return key
Ive tried:
on keyboardActivated
--
if the short name of the selectedfield = "search" then
focus on fld "search"
if environment() = "mobile" then
mobileSetKeyboardType "search"
--input type="search"
end if
end if
--
end keyboardActivated

and variants on this, obviously not the correct variant.
can any one help? Thanks Ron

[jacque]

A couple of things. I don't see "search" as one of the supported keyboard types, so you'll need to use something else. I see lots of Android apps that just use the default keyboard for a search. Users seem to know to tap the return key.

Also, the script needs to set the keyboard type before it is displayed, the setting doesn't affect any keyboard that is already on screen. Since the keyboard automatically appears whenever an editable field gains focus, keyboardActivated will run after the keyboard is already there. That also means you don't need the "focus on" line, since the focus has already been set -- it's what triggered the keyboardActivated message.

Try setting the keyboard type in a mousedown handler, which would occur before the keyboard is displayed.

[ronbird]

You’re quite right, I don’t see ‘search’ as a supported keyboard type either.
However new Android phones display a magnifying glass instead of a return key. Take a look at search in the email client, the contacts list, and their messenger. Only very early models of Android just relied on the return key. Of all the testing models I have, only one, an HTC that is so old it has ‘home’ ‘menu’ back’ and ‘search’ as hard keys, this is the only model that uses Return key.

Now that expectations have been set, I know that we could not rely on the user (nor the client) to accept just a return key.
So my question still stands, how do you call the search keyboard?

Thanks for the scripting tips and I shall try those, though I did test with other keyboard variants and the script does call whatever is requested.
Ron

[jacque]

It may be that the explicit focus command is triggering another opportunity to change the keyboard, but I'm guessing.

At any rate, I think the only way to get the search keyboard would be to submit a feature request.