Cannot open on-screen keyboard programatically

[Robert Schroll]

There is apparently no way to trigger the OSK programatically through javascript. In some circumstances, it would be nice to get keypresses entered without a text input.

[Robert Schroll (rschroll)]

Adnane Belmadiaf suggested you might be able to achieve this by setting the keyboard focus to an input element. I have been unable to get that to work. The attached file has a text input with autofocus. In the HTML5 container, the text input does not get focus automatically. In the browser, the input does get focus, but the OSK is not triggered. The same behavior has been seen setting the focus programatically, rather than with the autofocus attribute.

This is seen on an emulator running r226.

[Adnane Belmadiaf (daker)]

This is how the browser does focus the inputs https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/webbrowser-app/trunk/view/head:/src/app/KeyboardRectangle.qml#L72

[Robert Schroll (rschroll)]

Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it looks like that code is reactive, unsetting focus when the keyboard goes away, not active in showing or hiding the keyboard.

[Alexandre Abreu (abreu-alexandre)]

There is an upstream bug w/ qtwebkit about a js focus() not triggering the OSK:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-keyboard/+bug/1220264

Atm, there is no way around as long as we have qtwebkit as the backend and we unfortunately have to work around it for now :(

The KeyboardRectangle in the webbrowser-app is passive indeed, and does not trigger anything, it is there to allow the autopilot tests to work better when the OSK is around (to have an idea about the amount of real estate that it occupies).

[Robert Schroll (rschroll)]

In case anyone else is trying to work around this issue, here's the kludge I came up with to trigger and dismiss the OSK at will: https://github.com/rschroll/crosswords/commit/e714295baff5232b9bc6bcd7fcb621f4e09a8ca5. It's ugly and hacky, and I don't understand parts of it, but it seems to work on the emulator.

[Alexandre Abreu (abreu-alexandre)]

Marked as fix since as we switched to Oxide, a call to focus() works.