IssueTracker

Duplicate of a private issue. GOOGLE, WTF!! (What a Terrible Failure!!)

Any updates on that?

I wrote up an issue with my findings to React Native here, but I'm going to copy over what I've identified to save everyone time:

The Editor class, responsible for enabling text selection in Android, during its prepareCursorControllers phase attempts to access the root view from the TextView. On normal text views (i.e. not mounted in a recycler view), the root view is mounted with layout parameters. On text views mounted by a recycler view, the root view has null layout parameters. Subsequently, the check to ensure that the window can handle selections fails and the Editor sets its internal mSelectionControllerEnabled property to false.

The Editor has a performLongClick handler where normal selection events would fire. Towards the tail end of the function's implementation, it tries to call selectCurrentWordAndStartDrag. The third check, checkField, returns false because its call to canSelectText returns false. The canSelectText function is checking for that aforementioned mSelectionControllerEnabled property. This is what causes the debug warning to fire "TextView does not support text selection. Selection cancelled."

So why does firing setTextIsSelectable first with false, then true, work? There's a check within every TextView that sees if it's internal reference to the Editor mEditor and the given selectable property match. Sure enough, they do! So the function returns early and doesn't execute mEditor.prepareCursorControllers. But by flipping the selectable property to false, we end up falling through the entire function to execute prepareCursorControllers. By this point, we know the view has properly been attached to a window and not to the ephemeral RecyclerView, so executing that function should re-enable the selection controller.

It's the same reason why the solution linked in comment #11 uses setEnabled instead of setTextIsSelectable--that function also executes prepareCursorControllers. We could call setText too, or setMovementMode, but setTextIsSelectable felt like the leanest, safest way to do it.

TL;DR: if one of y'all could add a prepareCursorControllers call inside the onAttachedToWindow method for Editor, that'd be great thanks!