How to stop the android soft keyboard from ever coming up in my entire application

Question

I'm developing an application on a hardware device that has a built-in hardware keyboard that does not slide out so is always visible (like a blackberry). Therefore, I NEVER want the soft keyboard to display for my entire application. I'm aware of another SO question that gives the following lines of code:

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

But I don't know where to put this code to hide the soft keyboard in all places where it might possibly appear in my Activity. I have tried adding the code to Activity.onUserInteraction to no avail. It seems the keyboard appears after the onUserInteraction executes.

I also tried adding the following to my <Activity>:

<activity 
    android:windowSoftInputMode="stateAlwaysHidden"
>

Soft keyboard still appears.

Answer 1

Your application should not do anything. The device's firmware should contain a configuration that inhibits the soft keyboard based on the hardware keyboard being visible, just like every other Android device that has a hardware keyboard. If that is not happening, talk to the hardware maker and see if they are planning on addressing this.

Answer 2

An easy workaround for tomorrow presentation:

I would create a new IME with an empty view. Here are two openSource projects for you to look at some code.

• GreekIME at googlecode
• softkeyboard at googlecode

If you want to know more about input methods, go to Creating an input method.

Answer 3

If an EditText has an inputType of 0, the soft keyboard will never pop up when that EditText is selected.

EditText editText = findViewById(R.id.edit_text);
editText.setInputType(0);

This will of course need to be done for all the EditTexts in your application, or you could always subclass EditText and set the input type to 0 in your constructor.

Setting the xml inputType parameter will not do, since that corresponds to a call to the setRawInputType method, which does not remove the KeyListener.

Answer 4

I solved it by overriding onCheckIsTextEditor method in my a-bit-custom EditText.

@Override
public boolean onCheckIsTextEditor() {
    return false;
}

Answer 5

Where ever you have Edit text, put this code..

edittext.setInputType(InputType.TYPE_NULL);      
if (android.os.Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 11)   
{  
    edittext.setRawInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_TEXT);  
    edittext.setTextIsSelectable(true);  
}