Sunday, August 16, 2015

BlackBerry 10: Tracking the Virtual Keyboard from Cascades

There are things in BlackBerry 10 that are relevant to the UI of an application, which are not directly exposed via the API for the Cascades UI framework. One such thing is the state of the virtual keyboard. While you can infer this by the focus state of the text fields on a screen, that only takes you so far. Sometimes you really just need to know whether the keyboard is visible and how tall it is. Fortunately, they actually did expose an API for this through BPS.

What I'll be showing in this article is how you can wrap this event-providing BPS API for use from within a Cascades UI. In order to do this, we'll have to do several things: