How to keep soft keyboard always open in Xamarin Forms

Question

I am working in a Xamarin Forms APP, we want to go through different entries (not using TabIndex because we need a custom logic), but we want to keep the keyboard always on during looping through entries. We are using ReturnCommand to Focus the NEXT entry.

Answer 1

Create a CustomEntryRenderer in your Android project :

[assembly: ExportRenderer(typeof(Entry), typeof(CustomEntryRenderer))]
namespace your namespace
class CustomEntryRenderer:EntryRenderer
{
    public CustomEntryRenderer(Context context):base(context)
    {

    }
    protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<Entry> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged(e);
    }

}

and add this in your MainActivity:

 private bool _lieAboutCurrentFocus;
 public override bool DispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev)
    {
        var focused = CurrentFocus;
        bool customEntryRendererFocused = focused != null && focused.Parent is CustomEntryRenderer;

        _lieAboutCurrentFocus = customEntryRendererFocused;
        var result = base.DispatchTouchEvent(ev);
        _lieAboutCurrentFocus = false;

        return result;
    }

    public override Android.Views.View CurrentFocus
    {
        get
        {
            if (_lieAboutCurrentFocus)
            {
                return null;
            }

            return base.CurrentFocus;
        }
    }