Unfocusable element, focusable on touch

Question

I have an editText that I want to fill in automatically with info from other controls in the form, and at the same time allow to change its contents, discouraging the user from doing so though.

So I set this control to not focusable so when you press actionNext it moves on to the next control. However if you click the edit text, I want to allow the user to change its contents.

This is what I did:

  mNameEditText.setFocusable(false);
        mNameEditText.setFocusableInTouchMode(false);
        mNameEditText.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                mNameEditText.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
                mNameEditText.requestFocusFromTouch();
                mNameEditText.setFocusable(true);
            }
        });

However this behaves very weirdly, the result is that when you click, you can edit, but suddenly the next control (an AutoCompleteTextView) is not focusable anymore! Actually it looks like the focus remains on the edit text and goes to the autocompletetextview at the same time, like so:

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

• Make a sub class of your text edit view
• Use it in your view
• Set its enabled property to false
• Overwrite the touch handlers within your subclass: when the text edit view is touched, enable the view now and focus it. When the focus is lost, disable the text edit view again. Do all that in the subclass.
• Style the text edit view properly so that the user has the impression that it's editable