Android - customized keyboard key and action

Question

If you own Android phone you are no doubt have noticed how in the certain apps the keyboard layout can change from the standard issue to digits-only or to have .com or .net special buttons based on the text field input type (e.g. phone number). So I have 2 questions:

1. how to trigger this customization? I suspect it has to do with EditText format
2. Can this be taken even further if I want to add some custom buttons to inject a specific pattern? Say I would have an AND button which when pressed will add all uppercase " AND " surrounded by spaces to the text field. Can this be done?
3. What I'm not asking is how to capture some key combination in onKeyPress event and then populate text field with a pattern - I pretty much know how to do that already.

Answer 1

It is controlled by the android:inputType XML attribute (or the setInputType() method).

For info on the available options see the pages for the XML attribute or the object's method.

As an example, the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
    <EditText 
        android:text="example text"  
        android:layout_width="wrap_content" 
        android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
        android:inputType="phone" />
</LinearLayout>

will give you this layout:

whereas changing the inputType to textEmailAddress will give you this:

You can customize the "action" button as explained here, but I don't believe there's any way to do full customization of keyboards at this time, but I could be wrong.

Answer 2

The thing that concerns me is that "inputType" is listed as a deprecated property, meaning it may work for a while, but - eventually - Android will stop supporting it. Is there another alternative?

UPDATED: My bad - I'm confusing with inputMethod.