How to enable both hardware and virtual keyboards on Android ice cream sandwich

Question

I\'m developping a stock management application with Django for a customer\'s company, and want to use an ice cream sandwich tablet as the end-user device. I use an USB barc

Answer 1

Yes, the barcode scanner is detected as a Physical Keyboard. When a keyboard is connected to the device, by default the soft keyboard is disabled. To enable it, we need to turn OFF hardware keyboard via:

Settings > Language & Input > Select Input Method

The option name may differ from device to device. We will be able to use the scanner along with the soft keyboard even though we turn it OFF.

And NO, there is no way currently to programmatically accomplish this. The most we can do is detect when a scanner/keyboard is connected and redirect the user to the Input Method selection window, by overriding the onConfigurationChanged method like this:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
  super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
  if(newConfig.hardKeyboardHidden == Configuration.HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO) {

    ((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE))
                                  .showInputMethodPicker();
    Toast.makeText(this, "Barcode Scanner detected. Please turn OFF Hardware/Physical keyboard to enable softkeyboard to function.", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
  }
}