Why is Android WebView refusing user input?

Question

I'm developing an Android application that uses a WebView to display the login page for Facebook. The page loads beautifully, and I'm able to select the username/password textboxes, but typing in them will not work. That is, they definitely have input focus (they have the orange focus highlight box and a flashing cursor), but typing in them does absolutely nothing. I'm not certain, but I think maybe the form buttons are also playing up - they appear to be simply refreshing the page, rather than submitting the form.

Just to be clear, although I'm particularly interested in getting Facebook running, I'm sure that this isn't a Facebook issue since other websites (Google, etc) also display the same behavior.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be the issue?

Answer 1

Turns out that it was apparently the WebView not having focus that was the issue.

I discovered that using the arrow keys to get focus on the textboxes caused them to work, so I theorised that there was an issue somewhere with something not having focus, most likely the WebView not having focus. Sure enough, adding the following line seemed to fix the problem:

webView.requestFocus(View.FOCUS_DOWN); 

I'm still at a loss to explain exactly why the issue occurred in the first place - the textboxes should work whether they receive focus from being tapped upon or through being "arrowed" to - but at least I have a solution that appears to work.

Thanks for your input wf.