Need a way to decide if the Skip Button should be focused in real time, not when building ImaAdsLoader.

[victorraft]

We have a TV application that has a video player that can transition between fullscreen and collapsed mode. We're using the IMA extension and we want the Ads Skip Button to be focused only when the player is in fullscreen mode, not when it's collapsed. The ImaAdsLoader.Builder().setFocusSkipButtonWhenAvailable()' cannot be used, because:

a) We need to be able to decide whether the button gets focused or not at the time that the ad becomes skippable, not when the ImaAdsLoader is being constructed.
b) setFocusSkipButtonWhenAvailable is buggy and causes weird issues, like the ad container getting focused when the ad is loaded, instead of when the skip button becomes available.

On previous Exoplayer versions (2.11.8 and lower) we used to be able to use the following workaround:

// When building the ImaAdsLoader we capture the adsManager reference
imaAdsLoader.adsLoader?.addAdsLoadedListener { adsManagerLoadedEvent ->
            adsManager = adsManagerLoadedEvent.adsManager
}

// Then when we receive SKIPPABLE_STATE_CHANGED use the adsManager to focus the skip button
override fun onAdEvent(adEvent: AdEvent) {  
    when (adEvent.type) {
        AdEvent.AdEventType.SKIPPABLE_STATE_CHANGED -> adsManager?.focus() 
        else -> Unit
    }
}

In the current versions it is not possible to do that, because imaAdsLoader.adsLoader returns null.
Is there a recommended way of doing what I want, or do you think you could include such functionality into the SDK?

[andrewlewis]

Please could you give some more details about the bugs referred to in (b) so I can report this to the IMA SDK team to get the focusing behavior fixed?

Separately, I think we can add ImaAdsLoader.focusSkipButton (calling through to AdsManager in the AdTagLoader in 2.13) to address this. The app can add an ad event listener via ImaAdsLoader.Builder.setAdEventListener then call the new method. Does that sound sufficient to address this?

[victorraft]

When I use setFocusSkipButtonWhenAvailable(true) the following happens:
1 - the Ads WebView gets focused and displays a yellow border as soon as the preroll starts playing
2 - when the skip button becomes available the button gets the focus and the yellow border

I would appreciate if #1 did not happen, as this messes with my app's focus (it's a TV app so stealing the focus when we don't want it has consequences in the app's UX). Ideally the WebView and its other children (e.g. time counter) wouldn't be focusable at all, just the skip button.

And yes, to me it sounds like if you added ImaAdsLoader.focusSkipButton that would solve our problem!

[andrewlewis]

Thanks. I will plan to submit that fix soon and it should be included in the next release.

I also filed [Internal: b/179801842] to ask the IMA SDK to look into the unexpected focus stealing behavior.