I'm looking for a way to insert emoticons/smileys/any bitmap in a text field (LabelField, EditField, whatever). From what I've researched so far, there is no direct way to do this, so I'm stuck with trying to simulate this behavior.
I was thinking of using a normal text field and instead of smileys to insert blank spaces and then place some BitmapFields over the text field where the smileys should be. The problem is that I have no reliable/quick way of finding a character's position on screen (x,y).
Can you give me some ideas?
Can you think of other approaches to this problem?
I'm sure a lot of people encountered this kind of problem at one time or another. I hope there is someone who managed to find a solution. I'm desperate enough to accept any solution, no matter how crazy/complex/difficult.
Also, I would like to use this in SDK 5.0 and up, but I will settle for only 6.0.
What you might be able to do is create a custom Manager that is a container for EditFields and BitmapFields. When the user clicks in the initial EditField that is inside of your Manager and begins typing, you let them type until they want an emoticon. When they select it you create a BitmapField right after the EditField and then place a new EditField to the right of the BitmapField. You'll have to keep track of things like when the user hits backspace and empties an EditField, it should be removed, and then they are selecting the BitmapField, and a subsequent backspace would delete the BitmapField and put focus on the previous EditField.
You will have to also create your own EditField that you can control the size of, and BitmapField that allows for backspace to delete it.
As far as I can think ahead, you shouldn't have any problem using this for 5.0
Edit for comments:
You'll have to be implementing your own sublayout() of your Manager in any approach you take, so you know positions because you're the one who put them there. If you want to want to do multi-line (my approach was for single-line), you can do one of three things:
1.) Just have new EditFields for each line and do the linking the same way I talked about where backspace drops you to the previous Field, in this case the last line. You have to keep measurements of how big the field is based off of the text, and see if that will move it to the next line. If it does just adjust where the EditFields are positioned.
2.) You can do your image placement in the multi-line field by implementing your own EditField that expands height, in which case you'll know where the text is and what lines you are on. Drawing the Bitmap would be a matter of calculating (what line number you are) * (font height) and getAdvance(text_up_to_bitmap).
3.) Implement your own EditField where you have a focusable Manager that you manually do all of the drawing. You can parse a String that you save from capturing key strokes and maybe have a flag where an emoticon should be. Draw the text before it, draw the emoticon, then continue drawing the text. The difficulty with this is you will have to do things like determining where the cursor should be, bringing up the virtual keyboard, and handling some of the other tasks that the EditField does for you.
Related
I want to create a View very similar To the iOS notes application. The main function is to allow the user to get a check box in front of a line of Text.
My first attempt is this:
I have a UITextView where i try to insert buttons on the left side of the View, the Problem is i dont get the right y Position for each line and the whole text is offsetted even if there is no Button in Front of the line.
Question:
Is there a better approach, maybe much simpler or even built in functionality in UITextView i couldn‘t find?
If not, how do i get the exact y position of the line the cursor is currently in, so i can set the Buttons in the correct positions?
I want to create a multi lined edit text that can hold buttons but also have the ability to add free form text.
It should behave like the tag text box of stackoverflow that is under the body of the question when you ask a question on stackoverflow.
I thought about one layout that holds buttons (e.g. tags) and an edit text right after said layout. But as I want it to be multi-lined and if there was a line break, I'm not sure how the edit text should behave, since it couldn't be a quadratic box anymore.
Can you point me in the right direction? I've seen a post about making parts of an edittext uneditable. I could do this and put buttons over it, but the buttons might be a little bigger than the underlying text.
Do you know of alternatives?
I hope you get the point, if not I'll draw the control.
You can achieve same by using FlowLayout. Keep on adding text/button view it will automatically wraps contents to next line
I am displaying a text document using many UITextViews, one for each paragraph*. When the user drags the caret around it obviously stops when he reaches the beginning or end of a paragraph. Is there any way of letting the user drag the caret between text views as if all the text was in one text view? In a way that is allowed in the App Store?
* There is a good reason for this, at least if my proof-of-concept actually succeeds in proving the concept.
This would be a pain in the ass to implement, but going off this answer as an indicator of cursor-on-text:
how to get selected text from uitextfield in iphone?
Check the position of the cursor, and if it matches the length of text in a textfield, start a gesture listener, and if it moves down and right, change the focus to the next textview. Keep your textviews in an array for easy accessing.
i have a listfield where i am adding the contents in a horizontal field manager first and then adding the manager to a vertical manager. Visually:
----Image ---Text ----Image
---Text ----Image
---Image
How can i achieve this using a horizontal field manager
You might want to clear up the question a bit, but I'll try to answer what I think you're asking. ListFields don't support (natively) drawing a Manager as its row -- or a Field for that matter. What you'll need to do is in your ListFieldCallback's drawListRow() method, emulate this by doing the painting the way you want it to look. It would end up being measurements with bitmap.getWidth() and font.getAdvance(text) to figure out where to draw the images and text, but it should be a simple enough process.
Is it possible to add gui components to blackberry screen beginning from the bottom instead of the top ?
Thanks
A quick response would be no but let me explain why and suggest afew work arounds;
Screens don't actually handle the laying out of fields onto themselves, to do this they delcare a delegate manager which can be any type of manager, vertical, horizontal etc. The problem is all managers begin painting themselves from the top left. For a manager to paint fields starting from the bottom it would have to know exaclty where the bottom is located and add components up rather than down which goes against all the low level code inside the manager class. You can read more on managers in the BlackBerry API documentation.
You could still achieve an effect similar to this though by tweaking how you add fields and playing with field styles. For example consider this code:
add(new LabelField("field 1"));
add(new LabelField("field 2"));
This would give us the results;
field 1
field 2
because field 1 is drawn then field 2 below it. However if we were always to insert fields at the begining of our manager e.g. position 0 like so:
insert(new LabelField("field 1", FIELD_BOTTOM), 0);
insert(new LabelField("field 2", FIELD_BOTTOM), 0);
We would get the results;
field 2
field 1
Which is the results you'd expect from a screen described in your question.
I'm not really sure how you'd get the fields to paint to the bottom of a screen though, you could try researching the "position relative bottom" styles but I'm honestly unsure.
You are probably using a VerticalFieldManager, and the documentation on that says:
A vertical field manager lays out
fields top to bottom in a single
column.
So if you
manager.add(field1);
manager.add(field2);
manager.add(field3);
The order of the fields on the screen will be just that.
But you could do something like this:
Vector v = new Vector();
v.add(field1);
v.add(field2);
v.add(field3);
for(int i=v.size()-1;i>=0;i--) {
manager.add((Field)v.elementAt(i));
}
Sort of. You can use the Manager#insert(Field, int) method and always insert at the zero index. If you do this with a VerticalFieldManager, it would simulate a bottom-up adding of Fields to the Manager.
Some of the answers so far are to use Manager.insert(Field, int), and keep inserting at position 0. This will work, but the running time of the insert is linear in the number of elements already added to the manager. Meaning this solution will have an overall quadratic running time. Not a big deal if you're adding under 10 fields, but if you're planning on adding more than that, the insert overhead will be substantial.
If you can do the inserts top to bottom, by reordering the fields as Muger's solution suggests, the running time will be much improved.
Finally, you can write your own BottomUpVerticalFieldManager that does the layout the way you want. When you write your own manager, you can layout the fields in whatever way pleases you. In this case, it would be bottom to top. Writing your own manager may seem daunting, but it will give you considerable freedom in the future when trying to solve layout issues.