Is there an option to have both soft and hard keyboards active?

Question

I am developing a IME keyboard which will have a automobile dial pad as the input handler in android. More clearly, the dial pad turns decide which alphabet to select.if the dial pad is pointed to "a" and then click the center button of the dial pad, it selects alphabet "a". But my question is, is there a way i can have both hardware and software keyboards active consecutively? My need is, My dial pad soft keyboard comes up and then i need to test it by right and left arrow of the hardware keyboard.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

For future users- if you're implementing your own keyboard you can override boolean onEvaluateInputViewShown in InputMethodService. This function controls if the keyboard is shown, and the default implementation is to return false if a hardware keyboard exists. Change it to return true and it will work.

I don't know a way to do it from inside of an app.

Answer 2

for navigation part, i found the solution. go to settings->input -> default-> disable the hardware physical keyboard. then if any text edit is used, the soft keyboard comes up and then we can use the physical keyboard to navigate. (only navigation) .