How to handle a keypress Enter with Dart Web UI?

Question

I'd like to declaratively listen for an ENTER key press in an input field, with Dart's Web UI? I only want to run a method if ENTER was pressed, and I don't care about any other key.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Summary

Dart's Web UI package can declaratively register handlers for various events, like click and keyUp. The keyUp event will fire for every single keyboard up event. To filter those events, and to listen to only specific keys, you need to look at the keyCode attribute. Luckily, Dart has a convenience class for normalizing keycodes across browsers. You can use all of this inside your declarative bind attributes. Read on to learn how!

Listening for key presses

The InputElement class has a stream of events for the keyUp event, called onKeyUp (docs). The onKeyUp stream emits KeyboardEvent (doc) instances.

final Stream<KeyboardEvent> onKeyUp;

Old 'n Busted

The KeyboardEvent provides a keyCode accessor that returns a system specific key code. Unfortunately, some systems have different key codes for the same semantic key. Luckily, Dart has a fix!

New Hotness

Use the KeyEvent.wrap(KeyboardEvent parent) (doc) to emulating KeyEvent and normalizing confusing key codes!

new KeyEvent.wrap(keyboardEvent)

Now that you have an instance of KeyEvent, you can query its keyCode for a rational look into what key was pressed. The keyCode getter returns an int, but you can compare that against a list of keys from the KeyCode (doc) class.

var keyEvent = new KeyEvent.wrap(keyboardEvent);
if (keyEvent.keyCode == KeyCode.ENTER) {
  // enter was pressed
}

Cross-browser key presses FTW

The KeyEvent and KeyCode classes help to normalize key codes across systems and browsers, so you don't need to worry about various incompatibilities.

With Web UI

Web UI lets you declaratively register event handling. You can listen for key events and check if the enter key was pressed. Here is an example:

<input type="text" id="new-todo" on-key-up="if (new KeyEvent($event).keyCode == KeyCode.ENTER) createNewTodo()">

Notice how on-key-up registers the if statement, which uses KeyEvent and KeyCode to normalize the key codes. The createNewTodo method is only called when the enter key was pressed.

Ta da!