How to toggle “Use Physical Keyboard”

Question

I am trying to solve the same thing as the following post posts:

How to toggle "Use Physical Keyboard". and Switch from physical to software keyboard

Basicaly I want to toggle the native option from android to turn the physical keyboard on or off. However, I want to create this button through code.

None of those links have one good answer. Can anyone help me?

The thing is, they already have an option to do that in the system, why not letting that option to be made by the users? :S... I realy hope you are wrong :P — hsr-eufinity, Nov 05 '12 at 12:33
The reason that I will be surprised if this is possible is that changing input methods (e.g., from soft keyboard A to soft keyboard B) is not possible (for privacy and security reasons), and my guess is that a hardware keyboard will just be considered another input method. — CommonsWare, Nov 05 '12 at 12:47
I understand what you are saying, but I don't see any problem with this since this toggle button only controlls the use or not of the soft-keyboard. If i toggle off the physical keyboard, but I still have it connected, I can still use it to type, the only thing that happens is that the OS will display the soft-keyboard also. — hsr-eufinity, Nov 05 '12 at 12:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 18 '14 at 14:14

NO, there is currently no way to programmatically accomplish this. The most we can do is detect when a keyboard/scanner is connected and redirect the user to the Input Method selection window, by overriding the onConfigurationChanged method in your Application class:

@Override
public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {
  super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
  if(newConfig.hardKeyboardHidden == Configuration.HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO) {

    ((InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE))
                                  .showInputMethodPicker();
    Toast.makeText(this, "Barcode Scanner detected. Please turn OFF Hardware/Physical keyboard to enable softkeyboard to function.", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
  }
}

How to toggle “Use Physical Keyboard”

1 Answers1