Make EditText ReadOnly

Question

I want to make a read-only EditText view. The XML to do this code seems to be android:editable=\"false\", but I want to do this in code.

H

Answer 1

this is my implementation (a little long, but useful to me!): With this code you can make EditView Read-only or Normal. even in read-only state, the text can be copied by user. you can change the backgroud to make it look different from a normal EditText.

public static TextWatcher setReadOnly(final EditText edt, final boolean readOnlyState, TextWatcher remove) {
    edt.setCursorVisible(!readOnlyState);
    TextWatcher tw = null;
    final String text = edt.getText().toString();
    if (readOnlyState) {
            tw = new TextWatcher();

            @Override
            public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {

            }
            @Override
            //saving the text before change
            public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {
            }

            @Override
            // and replace it with content if it is about to change
            public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start,int before, int count) {
                edt.removeTextChangedListener(this);
                edt.setText(text);
                edt.addTextChangedListener(this);
            }
        };
        edt.addTextChangedListener(tw);
        return tw;
    } else {
        edt.removeTextChangedListener(remove);
        return remove;
    }
}

the benefit of this code is that, the EditText is displayed as normal EditText but the content is not changeable. The return value should be kept as a variable to one be able revert back from read-only state to normal.

to make an EditText read-only, just put it as:

TextWatcher tw = setReadOnly(editText, true, null);

and to make it normal use tw from previous statement:

setReadOnly(editText, false, tw);