native input text with PlayN

Question

Is there anyway to create an input text that opens the device target's native keyboard ? (from the bottom screen of iOS and Android devices).

I tried

tripleplay.ui.Field field = new Field();

But it only shows a pop up with a native text field.

Thank you

Answer 1

There's an experimental new API in TriplePlay called NativeTextField that can be used to overlay a platform-native text field with the right position and dimensions so that it appears to be part of your TriplePlay UI. When the user taps it to give it focus, the OS keyboard is shown and text entry works as it does normally in a native app.

There is currently only an implementation for iOS, but an Android implementation will eventually be aded.

Include the tripleplay-ios.jar in your ios/pom.xml like so:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.threerings</groupId>
  <artifactId>tripleplay-ios</artifactId>
  <version>${playn.version}</version>
</dependency>

and then add a call to your Main.cs file:

        IOSTPPlatform.register(platform);

where platform is the IOSPlatform returned by IOSPlatform.register.

With all of that wired up, then Field will automatically use the native text field implementation on iOS.

One other thing to note: the native text field just shows the native text field while text is being edited. When text editing is done, the native field is removed and the standard TriplePlay Field is used to display the current value of the text.

If this results in weird shifting of the text because the rendering is slightly different, you can leave the native text field in place all of the time with the Field.FULLTIME_NATIVE_FIELD style.

Answer 2

I am affraid there is no way to do that using the Field class. See this answer for more details.