Preventing the Android Keyboard from Showing on Page Load in NativeScript App

Background

This comes up from time to time and there are several approaches to resolve it and several approaches to prevent it from happening in the first place with an Android application.

This post is just a reminder to myself and others for a succinct way to prevent the Android keyboard from showing on page load when a textfield is present.

Solution

I prefer to do this in the onNavigatedTo or the loaded event of the Page.

import * as app from 'application';
declare var android: any; //bypass the TS warnings
if (isAndroid) {
     // prevent the soft keyboard from showing initially when textfields are present
     app.android.startActivity.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(
     android.view.WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_HIDDEN);
 }

That is it! You’ll now prevent the soft keyboard from showing when you open a page in your Android NativeScript app that has a textfield. It’s calling this native method: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/Window.html#setSoftInputMode(int) for reference. Again, this is the amazing power that NativeScript provides. Direct access to native Android and iOS APIs.

SearchBar Focus

I answered a question on StackOverflow about the focus being a SearchBar and here is the answer: http://stackoverflow.com/a/37868473/1893557. The code involves getting the parent layout and calling native Android methods for the focusing which prevents the keyboard from showing.

// get the parent of the searchbar
var parent = page.getViewById('searchbarParent');
var searchBar = page.getViewById('searchBar');
if (parent.android) {
    parent.android.setFocusableInTouchMode(true);
    parent.android.setFocusable(true);
    searchBar.android.clearFocus();
}