Automatically commit text in AbstractButton

[Michael Sheldon]

At the moment if a user is using predictive text or the pinyin keyboard (which always uses predictive text for Chinese character input) text is placed in to a "pre-edit" buffer prior to being committed to a text area. If text is still in the pre-edit buffer when a button is pressed it can be lost. To avoid this currently apps need to call Qt.inputMethod.commit() when a button is pressed (and a lot of apps currently don't do this), it would be nicer for app developers if this is handled by default in AbstractButton's onPressed.

See also bug 1324296 as the source of this issue.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

This should be handled more in the OSK itself rather than in the AbstractButton itself... AbstractButton is what its name said: an abstract button. It can be used everywhere, and binding an IM functionality to it just simply makes no sense.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

A better approach would be to commit the IM buffers when the component looses focus. However I would expect Enter/CR press to do auto-commit the buffer.

[Michael Sheldon (michael-sheldon)]

Just to update this based on our conversation on IRC:

It doesn't look like it can be reliably handled solely in the keyboard; since all we have to go on are reports of focus changes, which happen asynchronously from the perspective of the keyboard and the app. So the app could have changed pages or processed the text field in some way before we can commit to it.

Rather than just fixing this in AbstractButton, it sounds like the best option would be to have TextFields explicitly call commit on the QML side, when losing focus; this will then block until the text has been committed.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Can somebody assist me with testing? I don't know how to type Pinyin, or if it's broken, it only types Latin letters; if I enable word suggestions I get some kanji to select.

[Cris Dywan (kalikiana)]

Example on how to type Chinese 1. add Chinese input in system settings 2. launch an app that can input text like notes 3. long press global icon 4. select Chinese 5. press 'n' and 'i' 6. 你 should be shown as a word prediction

[PS Jenkins bot (ps-jenkins)]

Fix committed into lp:~ubuntu-sdk-team/ubuntu-ui-toolkit/staging at revision None, scheduled for release in ubuntu-ui-toolkit, milestone Unknown