For an Android program, I am having trouble handling key down and key up events, and the problem I am having with them can almost certainly be generalized to any sort of user input event. I am using Lunar Lander as one of my main learning devices as I make my first meaningful program, and I noticed that it was using onKeyDown as an overridden method to receive key down events, and it would call one of their more original methods doKeyDown. But when I tried to implement a very small version of my own onKeyDown overide and the actual handler that it calls, it didn't work.

I would probably copy and paste my implementations of those two methods, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. You see, I ran the debugger and noticed that they were not getting called - at all. The same goes for my implementations of onKeyUp and the handler that it calls. Something is a little weird here, and when I tried to look at the Android documentation for it, that didn't help at all.

I thought that if you had an overide for onKeyDown, then when a key was pressed during execution of the program, onKeyDown would be called as soon as reasonably possible. End of story. But apparently there's something more to it. Apparently you have to do something else somewhere - possibly in the XML when defining the layout or something - to make it work. But I do not know what, and I could not find what in their documentation. What's the secret to this?

Thanks!