How to use EditTextPreference as a masked Password text field?

Question

I have a very simple question:
I have a EditTextPreference dialog which I want to use for getting the user's password and I want it to be masked.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Here is a short example using xml:

<EditTextPreference
    android:key="@string/key"
    android:title="@string/title"
    android:summary="@string/summary"   
    android:inputType="textPassword" />

Or you can use numberPassword instead of textPassword.

Answer 2

android:inputType="numberPassword" doesn't work for me. Eclipse told me, that no String values are allowed for this attribute. So i used following:

<EditTextPreference
    android:key="@string/key"
    android:title="@string/title"
    android:summary="@string/summary"   
    android:inputType="number"
    android:password="true" />

This got me a EditTextPreference with a dotted textdisplay and a number keyboard for input.

Answer 3

If you want that the password mask persist also after device rotation is suffice to add the following imeOption:

in the edit text layout android:imeOptions="flagNoExtractUi"

or programmatically yourEditText.setImeOptions(EditorInfo.IME_FLAG_NO_EXTRACT_UI);