Creating custom keyboard for android

Question

Well, you might have seen few questions like asking for this. But reading all of those questions/answers and almost all of the android inputmethod webpages in Google, I am still in trouble.

My final goal is to create a custom keyboard. But of course, mine will have special input methods for certain language.

But this time, all I want is to show my custom view when the keyboard is popped up. I've managed to pop the default layout based on a qwerty.xml file, which is something like this.

xml/qwerty.xml

And in my class which extends InputMethodService, i have this code which creates input view.

private KeyboardView myKeyView;
private Keyboard keyboard;

@Override
public View onCreateInputView() {
    myKeyView = (KeyboardView)getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.keyboard, null);
    keyboard = new Keyboard(this, R.xml.qwerty);
    myKeyView.setKeyboard(keyboard);
    myKeyView.setOnKeyboardActionListener(this);
    return myKeyView;
}

and of course, because I had problems on applying my custom view to my source. I just made some effort on the other side. When Settings key in xml is pressed,

it will call SettingsActivity

@Override
public void onKey(int primaryCode, int[] keyCodes) {
    if(primaryCode == 999) {
        openSettings();
    }
}

public void openSettings()
{
    Intent intent = new Intent(this, WRKeySettings.class);
    intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);
    startActivity(intent);
}

It works nicely until here, but I am in to this view problem.

What I think from reading android develpers and some of the articles is that, I could extend KeyboardView to make my custom view and in this method, I might be able to draw keys somehow with onDraw(). But I am having so much trouble on doing this.

Any suggestions will pleased. Thanks.

Ricardo A. · Accepted Answer

To customize the keyboard you will need to modify your "qwerty" in the xml folder and the keyboard on the layout folder. I'll show some examples:

This goes on the layout folder

And this goes on the xml folder:

Like you said, you can extend a class from keyboard layout, but it's more for customize keyboard events, like onTouch, onLongKeyPress,

Creating custom keyboard for android

Answers (1)

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