Virtual keyboard in Symbian S60 5th edition: Which API to use?

You are right, this should obviously be a published API and it should be highlighted in the documentation. No such luck.

• If you are using one of the platform native controls, the virtual keyboard will automatically popup when the user accesses a text-editing control.

• If you are making a custom control, you need to deal with its selection by adding your own version of the virtual keyboard: make a new text-editing, window-owning virtual keyboard look-alike custom control with the right buttons. Reuse it accross all your applications. One day, Nokia will realize they have made an obvious mistake and make the API publicly available.

• If you are using direct screen access, well, you wouldn't exactly expect the very s60-looking virtual keyboard to popup out of nowwhere. Again, draw a nice image on the screen to let the user know where the virtual keys are and react to pointer events. This is going to be less reusable unless you build a good amount of customization (background, button edges...) into it.

EDIT: Nokia may be relying on Qt to fix this issue. I would expect the control to be part of the current 4.7 version of Qt.

Tinkering with focus on a QLineEdit inside custom coded kinetic scroll area, I've had a simmilar problem (how to open virtual keyboard manually). Then, I found it, this obviously works in Qt 4.6.3 on a C7 Symbian^3 phone:

// lineEdit is an instance of QLineEdit    
QApplication::postEvent(lineEdit, new QEvent(QEvent::RequestSoftwareInputPanel));

Before that, I also had to post a QEvent::FocusIn event to that same lineedit, otherwise the QLineEdit did not update the content from virtual keyboard.

Hope this is helpful. I lost hours.

Thank you tihi, very useful tip! There's also the "close virtual keyboard" event that can be triggered:

QApplication::postEvent(lineEdit, new QEvent(QEvent::CloseSoftwareInputPanel));