How to disable UiObject.clearText on send_keys - Appium 1.5 [Android]

[Lluis_Casals]

Every time I send keys on an input the UiObject.clearText is called:
[AndroidBootstrap] [BOOTSTRAP LOG] [debug] Attempting to clear using
UiObject.clearText().
This works smoothly, but it is possible to disable that?

[rpaliath]

Did you ever get a reply regarding this or were you able to figure this out? I am also facing a similar issue. Whenever I send a send_keys command, it is wasting quite a few seconds inside the UiObject.clearText()

[thomas_Holm]

Is there a way to disable this incorrect behaviour?
If the naming of the method is sendkeys then it should sendkeys and not do a clearTextAndSendKeys, if you want that simply call the cleartext method first.

As it is now it does not only take extra time but it also do things that you do not expect it to do.
Its for example impossible to append text in a field since sendkeys is also clearing text and not sending keys as is states.

[Lluis_Casals]

Totally agree, will be nice to have just a method that types keys, not "cleaning stuff". Actually what I do is send three spaces using the press_keycode 62 and when Appium does its "cleaning stuff" I avoid unexpected behaviours.

Maybe you can do a map en between the key codes and your test. Then you will use the press_keycode for each character, avoiding the Appium method... XD

[Telmo_Cardoso]

I created a method to append text that places cursor at the end of existing text in inputfield and then calls:

adb -s %s shell input text %s

where first %s is the device id and second %s is the text I want to append