android disabling OnScreen Keyboard

[Benjamin G.]

Hello,

Somebody know a way to disable onscreen keyboard on android device when entering in an input text field (application running with GAS) ?

Thanks in advance.
Benjamin

[Reuben B.]

It is an interesting read if you search through StackOverflow on other non-Genero who face similar issue.

I would suggest you get yourself added to ...
GBC-1544 - "Mobile: Would like a way to hide the virtual keyboard even if a field has the focus"
... which deals with this issue for Browser Client.  Also for Genero Mobile users, GMI-562 and GMA-1090 respectively.

It also helps when raising these type of issues to give a business reason behind the request.  So instead of saying "disable on screen keyboard on android device when entering in an input text field", say "disable on screen keyboard on android device with a barcode scanner attached when entering field where barcode will be used to scan and enter value"

Reuben

[Benjamin G.]

Hello,

Yes indeed "barcode fields" is one reason, another reason is that we use android device with keyboards (line intermec CN51, or SEUIC, ...)
There is an attribute in Genero that let us choose the 'keyboard style" linked to the field (phone field, email, ...) why not add an option to say "disabled" ?

Regards

[Reuben B.]

KEYBOARDHINT=NONE is one of the options that has been suggested for those cases http://4js.com/online_documentation/fjs-fgl-manual-html/#c_fgl_FSFAttributes_KEYBOARDHINT.html and that would certainly be beneficial for the case of barcode scanners that send keystrokes.

I had a support case with Genero Mobile asking a similar question.  The solution for that customer was amending the dialog statement so that it was something like ...

WHILE TRUE
   INPUT barcode, quantity
   END INPUT
   -- insert record
END WHILE

... the key being to exit out of the dialog once the record had been input and the user was ready to scan again.  When the user first enters the dialog, the keyboard was not brought up.


For the case with Android Device with keyboards, that would not be the solution.  I wold expect that to be done at system level e.g. quick google search with CN51 yielded http://hsm.force.com/publickb/articles/HSM_Article/CN51-Android-How-to-prevent-virtual-keyboard-from-popping-up.

Another possibility to investigate is in the GBC initialisation code, there are tests, is this a touch device etc, that are then used for subsequent behaviour.  It maybe that that test or its use needs refinement to cater for this case.

Reuben