How to delete a Keyman keyboard from my build?

Dictionary App Builder
1

I am using DAB 5.5 with Amazon Corretto. I decided to give it a try to add a Keyman keyboard to my app and see how it would go. It crashes my apps. So, I’d like to remove it. However, there seems to be no way to do so.

This appears to be a bug, but if anyone has found a way to do it or a work-around (other than re-building the app from the ground up), I would be glad to hear it.

2

I don’t have time to test this at the moment, but each DAB project is stored in an XML file here:

C:\Users\[user]\Documents\App Builder\Dictionary Apps\App Projects\[project]\[project].appDef

This .appDef file can be opened in a text editor (Notepad, or Notepad++ should be able to show you the XML structure), and IF YOU USE GREAT CARE, can be edited. I would recommend making a backup copy of the .appDef file before you make any changes, and then if things don’t go well, you can restore the old version.

I opened one of my files that doesn’t have a keyboard defined, and the .appDef file has two lines that look like this:

  <keyboards>
  </keyboards>

So my guess (untested), is that if you have defined a keyboard in the app and you want to remove it, just find this XML tag in your .appDef file, and remove everything that is found between the <keyboards> and </keyboards> tags, so that it looks like what I have above. Then save the file, open DAB and see if the keyboard has been removed.

Hope that helps…

3

Thanks for the idea. I tried this (very carefully), but somehow a bunch of the other metadata was gone when I re-opened DAB. Thankfully, as you recommended, I made a copy of the file before I changed it.
Any other ideas or do I just have to wait for the next version of DAB to come out in order to remove the keyboard and build a new functioning app?

4

In DAB did you select the keyboard then press the delete key? That is working for me in 5.5

5

Great! That seems to have worked!

6

In DAB 5.6, we have added more right-click menus to tables with ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ items to make these actions more obvious.

7

I’d like to know a bit more about how the Keyman keyboard crashes your app. That shouldn’t be happening so we should get on top of it! I’m a bit late to the party here but do you have any more detail on how/when it happens and any detail on the exception itself?

8

Hi Marc,
It happened when I would first open the keyboard when I clicked on Search. I believe I tried to click on the globe symbol and it stopped working. I can send you an apk of the offending apps if you would like to test it for yourself.

I only tested it on one phone (Android 9) so it wasn’t very extensively researched. I just figured if it didn’t work for me, I wouldn’t bother trying to get it to work for others.

9

Thank you, Richard, the right-click to delete the keyboard is what I was expecting since there are so many other right-click menus for similar things.

10

Yes, I’d love to check this out further; can you send me the apk or link to it via a private message on this forum?

11

I have replicated the crash with DAB and Keyman here and we are looking into this further.

1 Like
12

Okay, great, thank you, Marc. I am looking forward to hear when it is resolved. Then I will try again to include Keyman keyboards in my apps.