Schwiz Logcat|Thoughts, feelings, code samples, and more from an aspiring videogame programmer and Android enthusiast.

In a previous blog post I talked about how to avoid having your users make a new line when the press enter on an EditText view in your Android applications. It was a hack way where you had to make your own EditText class and override onKeyDown. It works just fine but since then I have found a much easier way to achieve the same goal.

First your activity or dialog needs to implement OnEditorActionListener, set the onEditorActionListener in onCreate and…. thats it!!!! Right out of the box the implemented method automatically cancels sends a null character instead of a new line character when you press enter.

public class AdjustStringDialog extends Dialog  implements android.view.View.OnClickListener, OnEditorActionListener{

	private EditText editTextView;

	public AdjustStringDialog(Context context, UnderlinedView mV) {
		super(context);
		setTitle("My Dialog Box");
	}
	@Override
	protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
		super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
		setContentView(R.layout.adjuststring);
		retisterViews();
		editTextView.setOnEditorActionListener(this);
	}
	private void retisterViews() {
		editTextView = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.editString);
		findViewById(R.id.finishedAdjustString).setOnClickListener(this);
	}
	@Override
	public void onClick(View v) {
		closeDialog();	

	}
	private void closeDialog() {
		//do what you want with the entered text
		dismiss();
		//update UI with new text if needed
	}
	@Override
	public boolean onEditorAction(TextView v, int actionId, KeyEvent event) {
		closeDialog();
		return false;
	}

}

Of course you can detect any key that is being pressed aside from the enter key with the event argument, and you can handle cases like the ‘Next’ button with actionId as well. Know any other ways to accomplish this, or care to share something you implemented with onEditorAction feel free to comment!
Cheers and happy 2010!

Ahoy Ahoy it has been way to long I need to write you more often, but I have been busy with school, and before that I had video games to play. Being busy with school is what ultimately let to the project I want to talk about today. Recently, while studying for my Calculus 2 class I found this amazing website WolframAlpha which is what they call a computational engine. It can do all kinds of awesome stuff I have barely scratched the surface on playing with its different capabilities. I mainly use it to quickly look up integrals and sums while doing Calc homework.

Long story short, I ended up using my G1 daily to look up integrals on my phone and I wanted a faster way to do it. After applying for a code to access their online API and never hearing back I decided the next best thing was to just make a quick launcher similar to the one Wolfram released for Vista.

It came together pretty quickly I think its the first program I was able to finish in one day, and bug free to boot (it seems).

It was pretty hassle free but I did run into a little snag I want to talk about. By default when pressing the enter key in the edit text box Android will make a new line, I wanted to launch the website. Getting this behavior was by far the most challenging thing to do in this project.

In order to pull this off you need to make your own EditText class that inherits from Android’s EditText class. Then, you have to override the onKeyDown function for the EditText class.

	public static class MyEditView extends EditText {
		//ref to the nesting the view
		walauncher launcher;

		public MyEditView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
			super(context,attrs);
			this.launcher = (walauncher)context;
		}

		@Override
		public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
			switch(keyCode){
			case KeyEvent.KEYCODE_ENTER:
				launcher.launchWebsite();
				break;
			}
			return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
		}

		@Override
		public Editable getText() {
			// TODO Auto-generated method stub
			return super.getText();
		}
	}

Thats the easy part, what is tricky is how do you actually use it in your XML layout for the app? For starters notice how the class is static in the code above, also it has to be nested inside the Activity class that will be using it. Then in the XML file you need to add a View tag with an attribute called class which equals yourpackage.activityname$nameOfTheCustomClass

<view
	class = "net.schwiz.wolfram.walauncher$MyEditView"
	android:id="@+id/inputID"
	android:text=""
	android:layout_width="fill_parent"
	android:layout_height="wrap_content"
	android:layout_weight="4"
	android:maxLines="1" android:inputType="text|textImeMultiLine">
</view>

Well ok I guess that wasn’t so tuff but it took me a while to find out how to do this on the developers website, they do this in the notepad tutorial though if you want another example. If you want to install my app search for schwiz on the Android Market. I went ahead and released the source, it can be found here.