NativeScript IQKeyboardManager Plugin

NativeScript wrapper for the popular IQKeyboardManager iOS framework, which provides an elegant solution for preventing the iOS keyboard from covering UITextView controls.

Installation

$ tns plugin add nativescript-iqkeyboardmanager

Usage

That's it! IQKeyboardManager takes care of all initialization when your app starts up by default.

Advanced usage

Grouping related textfields (previous / next buttons)

If your UI layout has sibling text fields, then IQKeyboardManager is able to automatically add previous / next buttons to the accessory bar which the user can use to jump back and forth. See those < and > buttons in the video above.

In case those fields were not direct siblings, until version 1.3.0 of this plugin, you had no way to force the previous / next buttons to appear. However, now you can:

NativeScript /w XML usage

Note in the example below that the two <TextField> controls are not siblings (both have parent <StackLayout> containers). Because of this, IQKeyboardManager will not automatically provide an optimized keyboard by default.

However, if you surround the controls with this plugin's <PreviousNextView> control, as the example below shows, you will continue to get an optimized keyboard as expected.

<Page xmlns="http://schemas.nativescript.org/tns.xsd" xmlns:IQKeyboardManager="nativescript-iqkeyboardmanager">
  <StackLayout>
    <IQKeyboardManager:PreviousNextView><!-- add this 'wrapper' to enable those previous / next buttons -->
      <StackLayout>
        <StackLayout>
          <TextField hint="Email"/>
        </StackLayout>
        <StackLayout>
          <TextField hint="Password"/>
        </StackLayout>
      </StackLayout>
    </IQKeyboardManager:PreviousNextView>
  </Stacklayout>
</Page>

NativeScript /w Angular usage

In the .modules.ts file where you want to use this feature (or the app.module.ts), register the PreviousNextView element:

import { registerElement } from "nativescript-angular";
registerElement("PreviousNextView", () => require("nativescript-iqkeyboardmanager").PreviousNextView);

Then in the view, use that element like this (again, we went nuts with the <StackLayout>s:

<StackLayout>
  <PreviousNextView><!-- add this 'wrapper' to enable those previous / next buttons -->
    <StackLayout>
      <StackLayout>
        <TextField hint="Email"></TextField>
      </StackLayout>
      <StackLayout>
        <TextField hint="Password"></TextField>
      </StackLayout>
    </StackLayout>
  </PreviousNextView>
</Stacklayout>

NativeScript /w Vue usage

Vue usage is very similar to Angular usage, the only difference is in how the element is registered. Open your app's entry file, and add this:

Vue.registerElement("PreviousNextView", () => require("nativescript-iqkeyboardmanager"). PreviousNextView)

Tweaking the appearance and behavior

Start by adding the following two paths into your app’s references.d.ts file. (See this repo’s demo app for a specific example.)

/// <reference path="./node_modules/tns-platform-declarations/ios/ios.d.ts" />
/// <reference path="./node_modules/nativescript-iqkeyboardmanager/index.d.ts" />

NOTE: You might also need to npm install --save-dev tns-platform-declarations to bring in NativeScript’s TypeScript definitions for native iOS development.

Next, initialize an instance of IQKeyboardManager with the following line of code.

const iqKeyboard = IQKeyboardManager.sharedManager();

You now have the full IQKeyboardManager APIs available for you to use. For example you could use the following code to switch to a dark keyboard.

const iqKeyboard = IQKeyboardManager.sharedManager();
iqKeyboard.overrideKeyboardAppearance = true;
iqKeyboard.keyboardAppearance = UIKeyboardAppearance.Dark;

For more examples of what's possible, run the demo app (shown in the gif below) and check out the app's main-view-model.ts file.

Documentation

For more details on how IQKeyboardManager works, including more detailed API documentation, refer to the library's CocoaPod page.

Maintainers

For maintainer’s of this plugin’s source code: when the IQKeyboardManager Podfile updates, you should generate new typings for for this plugin to reflect those changes.

To do so, execute these commands.

cd demo
TNS_DEBUG_METADATA_PATH="$(pwd)/metadata" tns build ios
TNS_TYPESCRIPT_DECLARATIONS_PATH="$(pwd)/typings" tns build ios

Next, locate IQKeyboardManager’s generated typings file in the demo/typings folder and override the IQKeyboardManager.d.ts file in this repo’s root.