Android SearchView empty string

Question

I'm trying to use a SearchView and I got everything to work, except when I want to search an empty string.
The onQueryTextChange does react when I remove the last character, but I want the user to be able to press the search button when the searchfield is empty.

 final SearchView.OnQueryTextListener queryTextListener = new SearchView.OnQueryTextListener() {
                @Override
                public boolean onQueryTextChange(String newText) {
                    // Do something
                    return true;
                }

                @Override
                public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) {
                    // Do something
                    return true;
                }
            };

        searchView.setOnQueryTextListener(queryTextListener);

I've also tried using a OnKeyListner. but it does not seem to work either.

            searchView.setOnKeyListener(new OnKeyListener() {
            @Override
            public boolean onKey(View arg0, int arg1, KeyEvent arg2) {

                //Do something
                return true;
            }
        }); 

This seems such a simple thing to do, but I can't get it to work. Any suggestions?

Edit

I have looked for a solution for a while now and just some minutes after posting this, I found a solution.
On this thread I found out this was not a bug, but it actually was deliberate.

Android SearchView.OnQueryTextListener OnQueryTextSubmit not fired on empty query string

So I just downloaded ActionBarSherlock and made some modification to the method onSubmitQuery()

From

private void onSubmitQuery() {
    CharSequence query = mQueryTextView.getText();
    if (query != null && TextUtils.getTrimmedLength(query) > 0) {
        if (mOnQueryChangeListener == null
                || !mOnQueryChangeListener.onQueryTextSubmit(query.toString())) {
            if (mSearchable != null) {
                launchQuerySearch(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_UNKNOWN, null, query.toString());
                setImeVisibility(false);
            }
            dismissSuggestions();
        }
    }
}

And the modified version

private void onSubmitQuery() {
    CharSequence query = mQueryTextView.getText();
    if(query == null) {query = "";}
    if (mOnQueryChangeListener == null
                || !mOnQueryChangeListener.onQueryTextSubmit(query.toString())) {
        if (mSearchable != null) {
                launchQuerySearch(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_UNKNOWN, null, query.toString());
                setImeVisibility(false);
         }
         dismissSuggestions();
    }
}

Hope this helps if anyone else is having this problem.

Answer 1

Perhaps it's not suited for your app but you also have the option to use a simple EditText, then add a TextWatcher listener. This way you catch every input even if the user enters an empty string.

Answer 2

I had same issue with SearchView but I did not want to use ActionBarSherlock so I came up with solution which consists of styling your own SearchView as shown in guide http://novoda.com/blog/styling-the-actionbar-searchview/ and setting OnEditorActionListener for EditText( How do I trigger an action when the user has hit enter?) which is part of the SearchView.

final SearchView searchView = (SearchView)findViewById(R.id.search);
int searchPlateId = searchView.getContext().getResources().getIdentifier("android:id/search_src_text", null, null);
EditText searchPlate = (EditText) searchView.findViewById(searchPlateId);
searchPlate.setOnEditorActionListener(new TextView.OnEditorActionListener() {
    @Override
    public boolean onEditorAction(TextView v, int actionId, KeyEvent event) {

        if (actionId == EditorInfo.IME_ACTION_SEARCH) {
            //Do something
        }
        return false;

    });