Default Focus and Keyboard to EditText in Android AlertDialog

Question

I am using the AlertDialog.Builder in Android to quickly prompt the user for text. The dialog shows up and works great, but the user must click on the EditText field to load th

Answer 1

Hidden keyboard when programmatically setting focus on an EditText in an Android Dialog.

I had this problem as well and it was a pretty simple fix - here is my suggested solution. Although it worked on DialogFragments for me, I see no reason why it wouldn't work in your case.

Basically the soft keyboard isn't triggered because the view is being created programmatically. The actual fix was simply putting this line in the onCreateDialog method:

dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_VISIBLE);

From the Android documentation on DialogFragments:

If the user focuses on an EditText, the soft keyboard will automatically appear. In order to force this to happen with our programmatic focus, we call getDialog().getWindow().setSoftInputMode(). Note that many Window operations you might have done previously in a Dialog can still be done in a DialogFragment, but you have to call getDialog().getWindow() instead of just getWindow().

@Override
public Dialog onCreateDialog(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

    //setup your dialog builder and inflate the view you want here
    ...
    //Make sure your EditText has the focus when the dialog is displayed
    edit.requestFocus();
    //Create the dialog and save to a variable, so we can set the keyboard state
    Dialog dialog = builder.create();
    //now, set to show the keyboard automatically
    dialog.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_VISIBLE);
    return dialog;
}