Keyboard and Rotation

Handling the Keyboard and Screen Rotation

Two activity attributes decide how a Cordova 129 app copes with the soft keyboard and rotation. Older guides set both with <edit-config>; cordova-android 15's template already does:

The activity's keyboard and configuration settings in the generated manifestShell

grep -o 'android:configChanges="[^"]*"\|android:windowSoftInputMode="[^"]*"' \
  platforms/android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml

Output

android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden|keyboard|screenSize|locale|smallestScreenSize
  |screenLayout|uiMode|navigation"
android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize"

configChanges lists changes the activity handles itself. By default Android recreates an activity on rotation, which would reload the WebView and lose BookNest's cart; with orientation and screenSize listed, the page just receives a resize event. windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize" shrinks the window when the keyboard opens, so a flex layout like BookNest's keeps the focused field visible; adjustPan would slide the whole window up instead. To test both, tap the search box, then rotate the emulator from the command line:

Rotating the emulator to landscape without the accelerometerShell

adb -s emulator-5558 shell settings put system accelerometer_rotation 0
adb -s emulator-5558 shell settings put system user_rotation 1

BookNest with the keyboard open, filtering on "the", and rotated to landscape

With the keyboard open, the footer rides above it and the list scrolls in the space that is left. After rotation the same page simply lays itself out wider (user_rotation 0 turns it back). The empty strip on the left is the camera cutout, which the WebView keeps clear of. If a layout works in one orientation only, lock it with the Orientation preference set to portrait.

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