How to handle differences in iOS and Android Keyboard - javascript

For HTML/JS in mobile browsers, I'm having an issue where blur events trigger differently in iOS and Android. In iOS, a user can click on "Done" on the native keyboard, which hides the keyboard and causes the focused element to blur.
The same, however, does not happen when a user clicks the back icon in Android to hide the native keyboard; The elements that were previously focused keep their focus.
Is there a way to listen for the keyboard hiding and trigger a blur on the focused element? Or is there a way to force the Android keyboard to display a "done" button? Or is there a generally better solution?

Maybe a solution would be to listen to the keydown event on the input, and check if the keypress is "Enter".
To do that, please refer to this :
Enter key press event in JavaScript

Related

Prevent soft keyboard closing on text input blur

I am building a Web chat application (PWA).
I have a chat input, which I would like to keep focus on even when the "send" button is clicked. So I want the keyboard to stay open even when a chat is sent, either by pressing a "send" button, or by clicking on the "send" in the mobile's keyboard itself. This is the behavior you get in messaging apps like Whatsapp, iMessage, etc.
Even though it works on Android as expected, but I can't make it work on iOS Safari / Chrome.
What I have tried so far is as follows:
Bind touchstart / mousedown event, call preventDefault and stopPropagation.
Additionally, I am also doing "preventDefault" on the click event.
How can I achieve this on iOS Safari with vanilla javascript + HTML?

How to prevent focus change on long press in Chrome on Android?

I want focus to stay on the currently focused DOM element. I am using the usual way to prevent focus change on click on another element:
button.addEventListener("mousedown", (evt)=>{evt.preventDefault();});
This works on normal clicks, but not on long press.
I expected it to work on long press too. Anyone knows if the behavior is a bug?
Is there any way to prevent focus change on long press?
Listen to the touchstart event:
element.addEventListener("touchstart", (evt)=>{evt.preventDefault();});
Note that you will still need the mousedown event listener for non-touch devices.

How can I focus on a text input without showing on-screen keyboard

I'm making a chat service, and I want to support mobile devices well.
On a screenshot below, there is an input field. It allows typing text, and to avoid issues like "if the text field is unfocused typing does nothing" it automatically gets focused when clicking outside of it - this does improve the experience on desktop computers. However, on devices with software keyboard, this causes on-screen keyboard to appear on mobile devices which is distracting.
Considering clicking anywhere focuses the text input, is it somehow possible to make on-screen keyboard only appear when the text field is pressed? Or alternatively, somehow detect devices with software keyboard enabled and disable this feature for them. Preferably without explicitly trying to detect mobile devices, touch screen or whatever as there exist touch screen devices with hardware keyboards.
This issue I was able to reproduce in Google Chrome and Opera Mobile on Android, and apparently it happens on iPhones, although I have no device to test it on.
Here is a rather simple example of an issue. If you touch the pink rectangle, it will cause touch keyboard to appear, which I don't want.
<input type=text id=f>
<div style="background: pink; height: 200px; width: 200px" onclick="f.focus()">
The short answer is that this is a built in function and you can't stop it, but there are a couple of options to consider.
1) use the onFocus event to immediately trigger the blur event to hide the keyboard again.
2) set readonly="true" on the element, later remove it and trigger the focus event.
3) create a fake input element with div's and css, when you want to trigger the keyboard focus on a hidden input field and copy out the value of the input on the keyup event as the user types.
Hope these suggestions were helpful to you.
If I got this right, you may also consider to change the logic of focusing the textfield when there is a click "anywhere". On touch-devices the touch events get dispatched first and you can cancel the click-handling (look for preventDefault(), return false; or stopPropagation() which should be called in you touch event handler).
You will need another event listener which handles the touch events outside the textfield, e.g. "touchstart".
If you want to keep the ui effect of a focused textfield, just add a css class "focused" to the textfield by script instead of using textfield:focused{} for your styles.

Javascript / jQuery Windows 8 On-Screen Keyboard

I'm trying to build an application where if the user activates a page, a focus event will occur and focus into a text field. I was half-heartedly expecting that when I called .focus() on in the input box, Windows 8 would pop-up the on-screen keyboard. This in not the case.
Does anyone know of a way to get the Windows 8 on-screen keyboard to come up when the text field is focused via javascript.
If the user "taps" into the textfield, the focus event does fire and the keyboard comes up.
I've tried binding to touchstart, 'touchend, click and focus, but all of these do not seem to activate the on-screen keyboard.
This application will run strictly on Windows 8, so there is no need to make it so that other platforms that do not have built-in on-screen keyboards work properly.
You can't. Only user actions can open the on-screen keyboard. This is by design. See here.

Emulating "input clear" icon in iOS-targeted web app

Native iOS apps contain "clear buttons" in input fields. They clear the text while maintaining field focus.
I am developing a web app targeted specifically at iOS devices, and not having any luck emulating the behavior. If I overlay another element with a click event to clear & refocus the input, the iPad ignores the call to focus because it begins hiding the keyboard the instant the blur event fires on the input (before the click event). Therefore the user must manually re-focus the field after clicking the clear icon to get back the keyboard.
Is there any way to grab a touch event on the overlay image/icon without the soft keyboard deciding to vanish, or a better way to do this?
daxelrod's 2nd comment above led me to the solution: Trap the mousedown event on the clear icon, stop it, and clear the input. Thereby a "click" never occurs, and the input does not lose focus.
I thought that blur() fired at the browser level before any of the mouse events (down, up, click) did, so I didn't think to try it. Glad to see I was wrong!
In Mootools flavored JS:
document.id('inputClearImage').addEvent('mousedown', function (e) {
e.stop();
document.id('input').set('value', '');
});

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