android - Stop ScrollView from auto-scrolling to an EditText

Question

Seems to be a common problem without a great solution that I have found. Goal is to stop a ScrollView from auto-scrolling to an EditText (or any view for that matter) that has focus.

You have a bunch of views (Buttons, TextViews, etc) in an ScrollView, one of which is an EditText. Upon clicking say a Button within the ScrollView, the ScrollView scrolls down to the EditText (its off screen). This is not desired, as there are other elements that you don't want scrolled off the screen.

Now I can stop this from happening when the screen first shows by having other focusable elements in the ScrollView. However, the general problem still exists. The user scrolls down manually to the EditText, enters some numbers, then scrolls up to the top (EditText off screen now), they click a button in the ScrollView, and guess what? The ScrollView scrolls down to that darn EditText.

I'm thinking about extending the ScrollView and overriding some of the methods there like findFocusableViewInBounds, but I have a feeling I'll just be getting myself into more trouble.

Please help if you can.

I've played around with things like having an 0 height EditText at the top of my ScrollView, adding Next Focusable element properties to the other items in the ScrollView, etc. I suppose one "hack" might be to get the EditText to lose focus when the virtual or manual keyboard gets hidden or something.

Answer 1

After struggling with that problem for quite some time, I've found a solution that seems to work without being too ugly. First, make sure that whatever ViewGroup (directly) contains your EditText has descendantFocusability set to "Before Descendants," focusable set to "true" and focusableInTouchMode set to "true." This will not be the ScrollView itself, but the layout inside where you have your various views. Next add an onTouchListener to your ScrollView that removes focus from the EditText whenever it is touched, like so:

ScrollView scroll = (ScrollView)findViewById(R.id.scrollView1);
scroll.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {

    @Override
    public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
        if (myEditText.hasFocus()) {
            myEditText.clearFocus();
        }
        return false;
    }
});

Tell me if that doesn't fix it. What should happen is that the Layout gets focus instead of the EditText, so no scrolling should happen.