Android: how to capture long press event on soft input/keyboard?

Question

Short version of question: how can I capture long press event on soft input/keyboard in Android?

Long version: In an Android app, we have a multi-line EditText, and we want to have this behavior: 1. By default, it's showing a DONE button, by tapping it, soft input/keyboard will be closed. 2. If user long press the DONE button, its behavior will be changed to ENTER button, and there will have a new line in the EditText.

For requirement #1, I used the solution in here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/12570003/4225326

For requirement #2, the blocking question I have is, how to capture the long press event. I set the onEditorActionListener, but the captured event is null: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextView.OnEditorActionListener.html I searched the document, the long press related method is for hard keyboard: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#onKeyLongPress(int, android.view.KeyEvent), I can't find one for soft input/keyboard.

Thanks for looking into this question.

Answer 1

I could not find this answer myself, so I manually coded the solution. I used a timer on the onPress() and onRelease() events of the KeyboardView.OnKeyboardActionListener. Here's the important code. Many TRY/CATCHes left out for brevity. In English, when a key is pressed, I'm starting a timer that waits the same time as a long-click event normally waits (ViewConfiguration.getLongPressTimeout()), then executes an on-long-click event on the original thread. Subsequent key releases and key presses can cancel any active timer.

public class MyIME
    extends InputMethodService
    implements KeyboardView.OnKeyboardActionListener {
    :
    :
    private Timer timerLongPress  = null;
    :
    :

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        :
        :
        timerLongPress = new Timer();
        :
        :
    }

    @Override
    public void onRelease(final int primaryCode) {
        :
        :
        timerLongPress.cancel();
        :
        :
    }

    @Override
    public void onPress(final int primaryCode) {
        :
        :
        timerLongPress.cancel();
        :
        :
        timerLongPress = new Timer();

        timerLongPress.schedule(new TimerTask() {

            @Override
            public void run() {

                try {

                    Handler uiHandler = new Handler(Looper.getMainLooper());

                    Runnable runnable = new Runnable() {

                        @Override
                        public void run() {

                            try {

                                MyIME.this.onKeyLongPress(primaryCode);

                            } catch (Exception e) {
                                Log.e(MyIME.class.getSimpleName(), "uiHandler.run: " + e.getMessage(), e);
                            }

                        }
                    };

                    uiHandler.post(runnable);

                } catch (Exception e) {
                    Log.e(MyIME.class.getSimpleName(), "Timer.run: " + e.getMessage(), e);
                }
            }

        }, ViewConfiguration.getLongPressTimeout());
        :
        :
    }

    public void onKeyLongPress(int keyCode) {
        // Process long-click here
    }