Android: AutoCompleteTextView show suggestions when no text entered

I am using AutoCompleteTextView, when the user clicks on it, I want to show suggestions even if it has no text - but setThreshold(0) works exactly the same as setThreshold(1) - so the user has to enter at least 1 character to show the suggestions.

Solution 1:

This is documented behavior:

When threshold is less than or equals 0, a threshold of 1 is applied.

You can manually show the drop-down via showDropDown(), so perhaps you can arrange to show it when you want. Or, subclass AutoCompleteTextView and override enoughToFilter(), returning true all of time.

Solution 2:

Here is my class InstantAutoComplete. It's something between AutoCompleteTextView and Spinner.

import android.content.Context;  
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.widget.AutoCompleteTextView;

public class InstantAutoComplete extends AutoCompleteTextView {

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context arg0, AttributeSet arg1) {
        super(arg0, arg1);
    }

    public InstantAutoComplete(Context arg0, AttributeSet arg1, int arg2) {
        super(arg0, arg1, arg2);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean enoughToFilter() {
        return true;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onFocusChanged(boolean focused, int direction,
            Rect previouslyFocusedRect) {
        super.onFocusChanged(focused, direction, previouslyFocusedRect);
        if (focused && getAdapter() != null) {
            performFiltering(getText(), 0);
        }
    }

}

Use it in your xml like this:

<your.namespace.InstantAutoComplete ... />

Solution 3:

Easiest way:

Just use setOnTouchListener and showDropDown()

AutoCompleteTextView text;
.....
.....
text.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener(){
   @Override
   public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event){
      text.showDropDown();
      return false;
   }
});

Solution 4:

Destil's code works just great when there is only one InstantAutoComplete object. It didn't work with two though - no idea why. But when I put showDropDown() (just like CommonsWare advised) into onFocusChanged() like this:

@Override
protected void onFocusChanged(boolean focused, int direction,
        Rect previouslyFocusedRect) {
    super.onFocusChanged(focused, direction, previouslyFocusedRect);
    if (focused) {
        performFiltering(getText(), 0);
        showDropDown();
    }
}

it solved the problem.

It is just the two answers properly combined, but I hope it may save somebody some time.