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We are developing an AIR application for a huge touch table (110-inch, with 40 simultaneous touch points) that should allow multiple users to collaborate during a meeting by exchanging documents, contacts, notes etc. We are using: actionscript 3, robotlegs framework to wire the application stacks and for the dependency injection, gesture works for touch points and gestures management. Every user has the possibility of opening a bloc-notes to take on the fly notes. Every bloc-note has its own virtual keyboard, now the problem is that the keyboard is bind with the focus event of the text area so when there are more than one textarea all the keyboards on the stage write on the text area focused. We have used other kinds of events but we couldn't work out this problem. Any idea in how to manage focus events for multiple users or put in another way is it possible with actionscript to have multiple focus areas on a unique stage (even if this could appear contradictory)?

gpar
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You could manage focus manually by having a single, high-priority 'key down' event listener on stage and then routing the keypresses appropriately, but then the problem becomes differentiating from which keyboard the key event originated. If you have custom keyboards, that could be fixed by having keyboards post custom key down events.

Hope this helps.

jpop
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  • We have _virtual_ keyboards, they are movieclips added as child to the specific bloc-note view instance but when a user click on a textarea they *all* bind to that textarea (I suppose because there can be only one focus in a input at a time on the stage), even if the textarea is part of a bloc-note instance that has not called that virtual keyboard. – gpar Oct 15 '13 at 08:54
  • Then you have no problem. Have virtual keyboards post keypresses, which bloc-note components catch and input text manually into textfields (and then stop key event propagation). Each bloc-note does all its processing internally so no keypress events exit the component at all. That way you sidestep all the focus issues. – jpop Oct 15 '13 at 10:26
  • Yes at the end we have used the event mouse click on the textarea and delegated the appendText not to the single key but to the keyboard and set at the level of the keyboard which textarea to connect to. The only drawback is that we don't have the cursor. Thank you jpop. – gpar Oct 16 '13 at 16:13