When switching between fields with specific input types oxide briefly reports that they're freetext

[Michael Sheldon]

When oxide switches between two input fields that have specific input types associated with them (e.g. two email fields) it briefly reports that they are default free text fields via the input method extension. This results in the keyboard briefly displaying the wrong layout.

To reproduce:

 1) Visit http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/oxide-input.html

 2) Tap first text field, keyboard should appear and show email layout

 3) Tap second text field

Expected result:

Keyboard remains in email layout

Actual result:

Keyboard briefly switches to default layout and then back to email layout.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I verified (with http://mikeasoft.com/~mike/oxide-input.html) that this doesn’t happen with chrome on android.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

When switching focus from one field to the other on the example page, this is the sequence of oxide events I’m observing:

    WebView::OnTextInputStateChanged() : text input type changes from EMAIL to NONE
    WebView::OnFocusedNodeChanged() : focused field changes
    WebView::OnTextInputStateChanged() : text input type changes back from NONE to EMAIL

which explains the brief layout change.

Since chrome on android behaves differently, there must be a way to be cleverer about OnTextInputStateChanged events.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I have submitted a fix for oxide which prevents calling QInputMethod::update() with Qt::ImHints if the current input method type is none (see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~osomon/oxide/osk-flicker-fix/revision/798).

However, even with that fix, I’m still seeing the OSK layout briefly reset to the default one. I’m wondering if the OSK might be resetting its layout when requested to show (even if already visible)? Adding an ubuntu-keyboard task for further investigation.