hello, Eric!

how can I help you today?

what's up mark

just writing up yet another Android Q bug

I have a searchview which I want to prevent the soft keyboard from appearing if a condition holds true, and reenable it otherwise

do you mean that you want the SearchView disabled when the condition holds true?

I want to still allow the user to type and therefore backspace but hide the softkeyboard until a condition is true

but... if the soft keyboard is not visible, they cannot type and therefore backspace

well they could have an external keyboard

yes, but then why do you want to penalize users of soft keyboards? IOW, what is the problem with the soft keyboard showing if this condition is true?

I have a search functionality where if I get search results I show them. But if I dont I show a different view. The problem is if I don't get search results with the string so far typing additional characters isn't going to help, but whenever a new character is entered the softkeyboard pops up, then quickly goes away.

"but whenever a new character is entered the softkeyboard pops up" -- the soft keyboard was already up, as that is how they entered a new character, right?

if they have an external keyboard, the soft keyboard is suppressed by the OS

the last part about it going away is behavior I didn't expect. I have a list that becomes GONE and an error view that becomes VISIBLE. For some reason that also causes the softkeyboard to disappear. Entering a new character makes it pop up again, but the result set is still 0 and the same occurs

then, isn't the problem that the soft keyboard is going *away*? usually, we want the keyboard visible while the user is typing (even if, in this case, the typing isn't necessarily that useful)

so, I would expect that what you want is that the soft keyboard, once opened, stays stable until the user dismisses it or something significant happens that causes you (and the user) to want it to stay gone

yes I don't know why that's happening. But I actually don't want it to stay there because it blocks text from the error view

isn't that a problem with the layout, then?

I don't have a solution for "ban the soft keyboard but have the SearchView otherwise work"

ok

AFAIK, either you disable it outright, or you leave it alone and address the other problems

alright thanks that was it