Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

I'm developing an inventory app and I've got it running on a Zebra TC20. The device has physical buttons that can scan barcodes and emulate a keyboard input. Everything works, but I'm trying to come up with ways to improve the UX. What I'd like to do is have some kind of control that waits for a keyboard input. Like a text input control that doesn't have to be actually selected. Alternatively, if there is a way to suppress a keyboard pop-up on the screen when a text input is selected, that could work too.

Any ideas?

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Building Power Apps

Hi @Anonymous ,

For your first question:

..some kind of control that waits for a keyboard input. Like a text input control that doesn't have to be actually selected.

I would say that for this specific scenario, you would need to have a control that would be listening to user input on a certain endpoint, which would trigger once any information was sent form said endpoint, and act upon it.

Unfortunately, I do not know of the existence of any controller that could help in this situation. As such, my suggestion would be to develop a custom connector.

The connector could have an action to listen to a certain endpoint (e.g. Physical Keyboard), and once any input was detected, send the data into a TextInput box.

As for the second question:

Alternatively, if there is a way to suppress a keyboard pop-up on the screen when a text input is selected, that could work too.

This option unfortunately is only available for Combo Box type. To do so you would need to select the Combo Box and go to Properties. At the properties you can then disable the "allow searching", which disables the keyboard.

For the rest of the input fields this is not possible, and once selected the virtual keyboard will prompt up.

There is a feature suggestion that was raised on our PowerApps Ideas forum here, for this specific feature to be evaluated, which you can upvote in order to raise awareness for this request.

However, in this same request there is a workaround that was suggested by another user, that could potentially be useful in this situation.

Put your text field in view mode instead of edit that will disable the native keyboard on any device.
Place a transparent button on top of the text field. This can be achieved by setting the visible property to Off.
Change the OnSelect property of the button, and put the action you would have on the OnSelect of the TextField.

This way you can have a on select exactly like you did with the text field but you are actually pressing a transparent button so the keyboard doesn't come up.

I hope this information has helped you progress in any way, and feel free to drop me any other questions related to this topic. 🙂

Regards,

Ricardo