I'm having some problems to navigate on a gridView using the keyboard (with up, down, left and right keys).
I'm new in Android and maybe this question has a simple answer. I looked for a solution and anything could help me.
The problem is that I would like to change the way of navigation among items of a grid view. I would like to do it due to two reasons.
The first reason is related to the fact that some itens have clickable subitens (and consequently the entire item is not clickable). When the focus is changed from a item i to the item i+1, for example, the item i+1 must be checked if has subitens. If yes, the focus is changed to one of the subitens depending on direction (ie. if left to right, the first subitem on the left is focused).
The second reason is that in my application, the up arrow should works in the same way as the left arrow and the down arrow in the same way of the right arrow. So, I just need see if the keyCode of a onKey event is UP or DOWN and convert it to LEFT and RIGHT, respectively.
I thought that would be a simple task: override the onKeyDown method and treat these specificities, but I observed that my implementation of onKeyDown was invoked just in two cases: (1) when other keys are pressed (with exception of the aforementioned arrows and (2) when the grid view lost the focus. For example, if the item C1 is the current item selected and the user click to the left or down, the onKey is not invoked. Otherwise, if the right or up are typed, my method is invoked.
Is there any way to cancel this internal mechanism of grid view? I tried different ways, as follows: (1) Implementation of OnKeyListener directly on the gridview and on the item (on the adapter) as well. (2) Implementation of different callbacks to see which one would be called before this internal mechanism (like OnFocusChangeListener, OnKeyListener, OnItemSelectedListener). I tried both for the grid view and each item on the adapter. (3) Instantiation of the gridview with the selector setted to a transparent image. When the desired item is reached on my keyEvent, I added a visible selector. It worked on the first event but when the visible selector is setted it does not back to the invisible selector.
I tried to be clear and I hope to anyone of you could help =)
Thank you so much