Introduce multi-client IME for special form factors
An advanced multi-display support is requested for certain Android form-factors so that user(s) can type text on each display at the same time without losing software keyboard focus in other displays. This is not possible in existing Android IMEs that are built on top of InputMethodService class, because the assumption that a single IME client can be focused at the same time was made before Android IME APIs were introduced in Android 1.5 and many public APIs in InputMethodService have already relied heavily on that assumption. Updating InputMethodService class to support multi-client scenario is, however, quite challenging because: 1. doing so would introduce an unacceptable amount of complexity into InputMethodService, which is already hard to maintain, 2. IME developers still need to update their implementation to be able to support parallel requests from multiple focused IME client, which may require non-trivial redesign in their side (e.g. input decoder, typing history database, ...), and 3. actual use cases for multi IME clients are expected to be evolved rapidly hence the new protocol is not yet stable and not yet ready to be exposed as public APIs. This is why a new type of IME needs to be designed and developed specifically for such special multi-display environments, rather than reusing existing InputMethodService public class. Note that there must be no behavior change unless multi-client IME is explicitly enabled with 'adb shell setprop', which requires root permission. See multi-client-ime.md for details. Fix: 114662040 Test: Manually verified as follows: 1. make -j MultiClientInputMethod 2. adb install -r $OUT/system/priv-app/MultiClientInputMethod/MultiClientInputMethod.apk 3. adb root 4. adb shell setprop persist.debug.multi_client_ime \ com.example.android.multiclientinputmethod/.MultiClientInputMethod 5. adb reboot 6. Try multiple text input scenario Change-Id: I41dfe854557b178d8af740bc2869c936fc88608b
Loading
Please register or sign in to comment