How do I handle double click on a GWT web application running on a touch device? - events

Question

I have built a GWT (2.5) web application that, among other things, uses a DataGrid. I have used addDomHandler to add a DoubleClickEvent to select a row and perform an action, and it works great on the desktop. However, when I run the web application on a touch device, the double click zooms the screen instead. Is there are proper way to handle that? I would prefer to override the default behavior of zooming, but I have no idea where to begin. I suppose a long press might be more appropriate, but I have no idea where to begin with that either.
The code:
_dataGrid.addDomHandler(new DoubleClickHandler() {
#Override
public void onDoubleClick(DoubleClickEvent event) {
// Do something exciting here!
}
}, DoubleClickEvent.getType());

Answer 1

The only idea I have it that stopping the propagation of the DOM event may prevent the default zoom behavior.
Although I'd be curious is it registers as a double-click event at all on a touchscreen device. Would be worth trying just putting the handler on Root and seeing if you can even catch the event.
Also try this: just have your application catch -any- DOM event and simply write the name out somehow. That way you, should find out what event is triggering (might be one for long touch!) and can write a handler for that.

Answer 2

OK, I found a solution, but it's probably pretty unique to my situation. What I did was keep the double click handler and I also implemented a slow double click. In other words, if you select the same row of the DataGrid twice in sequence, no matter how fast you do it, then the application interprets that as a double click. Here is the code:
result.addDomHandler(new ClickHandler() {
#Override
public void onClick(ClickEvent event) {
Scheduler.get().scheduleDeferred(new Command() {
public void execute () {
if (result.isDoubleTap()) {
// Do the same thing a a double click.
}
}
});
}});
I had a problem with the click handler being fired before the selection change handler, so I had to defer the processing of the click event with the Scheduler. The "result" is a Composite that contains the DataGrid and some other stuff, and in each "result" I store the last selected item in a private variable. Then in IsDoubleTap() all I do is see if the current selection is the same as the last one:
public boolean isDoubleTap() {
boolean result = false;
String selected = getSelected();
if (_lastSelect != null && selected != null && selected.equals(_lastSelect))
result = true;
_lastSelect = selected;
return result;
}
So effectively if you do a normal double click or a slow double click you get the same action. I'm just glad that while I use this result object many places, it is the only place that I use a double click. And I would REALLY like to have a conversion with the committee that decided overriding standard double click behavior with a touch device was a GOOD thing.