How to hide soft keyboard on android after clicking outside EditText?

You can achieve this by doing the following steps:

1. Make the parent view(content view of your activity) clickable and focusable by adding the following attributes

       android:clickable="true" 
       android:focusableInTouchMode="true" 
   

2. Implement a hideKeyboard() method

       public void hideKeyboard(View view) {
           InputMethodManager inputMethodManager =(InputMethodManager)getSystemService(Activity.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
           inputMethodManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(view.getWindowToken(), 0);
       }
   

3. Lastly, set the onFocusChangeListener of your edittext.

       edittext.setOnFocusChangeListener(new View.OnFocusChangeListener() {
           @Override
           public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
               if (!hasFocus) {
                   hideKeyboard(v);
               }
           }
       });
   

As pointed out in one of the comments below, this might not work if the parent view is a ScrollView. For such case, the clickable and focusableInTouchMode may be added on the view directly under the ScrollView.

The following snippet simply hides the keyboard:

public static void hideSoftKeyboard(Activity activity) {
    InputMethodManager inputMethodManager = 
        (InputMethodManager) activity.getSystemService(
            Activity.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
    if(inputMethodManager.isAcceptingText()){
        inputMethodManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(
                activity.getCurrentFocus().getWindowToken(),
                0
        );
    }
}

You can put this up in a utility class, or if you are defining it within an activity, avoid the activity parameter, or call hideSoftKeyboard(this).

The trickiest part is when to call it. You can write a method that iterates through every View in your activity, and check if it is an instanceof EditText if it is not register a setOnTouchListener to that component and everything will fall in place. In case you are wondering how to do that, it is in fact quite simple. Here is what you do, you write a recursive method like the following, in fact you can use this to do anything, like setup custom typefaces etc... Here is the method

public void setupUI(View view) {

    // Set up touch listener for non-text box views to hide keyboard.
    if (!(view instanceof EditText)) {
        view.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {
            public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
                hideSoftKeyboard(MyActivity.this);
                return false;
            }
        });
    }

    //If a layout container, iterate over children and seed recursion.
    if (view instanceof ViewGroup) {
        for (int i = 0; i < ((ViewGroup) view).getChildCount(); i++) {
            View innerView = ((ViewGroup) view).getChildAt(i);
            setupUI(innerView);
        }
    }
}

That is all, just call this method after you setContentView in your activity. In case you are wondering what parameter you would pass, it is the id of the parent container. Assign an id to your parent container like

<RelativeLayoutPanel android:id="@+id/parent"> ... </RelativeLayout>

and call setupUI(findViewById(R.id.parent)), that is all.

If you want to use this effectively, you may create an extended Activity and put this method in, and make all other activities in your application extend this activity and call its setupUI() in the onCreate() method.

Hope it helps.

If you use more than 1 activity define common id to parent layout like <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/main_parent"> ... </RelativeLayout>

Then extend a class from Activity and define setupUI(findViewById(R.id.main_parent)) Within its OnResume() and extend this class instead of ``Activity in your program

---

Here is a Kotlin version of the above function:

@file:JvmName("KeyboardUtils")

fun Activity.hideSoftKeyboard() {
    currentFocus?.let {
        val inputMethodManager = ContextCompat.getSystemService(this, InputMethodManager::class.java)!!
        inputMethodManager.hideSoftInputFromWindow(it.windowToken, 0)
    }
}