Android: show soft keyboard automatically when focus is on an EditText

Question

I'm showing an input box using AlertDialog. The EditText inside the dialog itself is automatically focused when I call AlertDialog.show(), but the soft keyboard is not automatically shown.

How do I make the soft keyboard automatically show when the dialog is shown? (and there is no physical/hardware keyboard). Similar to how when I press the Search button to invoke the global search, the soft keyboard is automatically shown.

Answer 1

You can create a focus listener on the EditText on the AlertDialog, then get the AlertDialog's Window. From there you can make the soft keyboard show by calling setSoftInputMode.

final AlertDialog dialog = ...;

editText.setOnFocusChangeListener(new View.OnFocusChangeListener() {
    @Override
    public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
        if (hasFocus) {
            dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_VISIBLE);
        }
    }
});