Hardware Input Handling: Managing Hardware Events with EFL Extension

The Tizen platform offers the Menu, Back, and Home keys as physical hardware keys for mobile devices and rotary component parts for wearable devices. You can also utilize the hardware keys in other applications with key grabbing.

Basically, EFL does not depend on any specific hardware input methods, such as hardware keys, to generate back and home events, or rotary component parts to generate rotary events. Instead these hardware input events have tightly related to the Tizen UX. As a result, EFL has created the EFL extension library to support common UX behavior between applications and hardware events.

When the user presses the Menu or Back key, the key generates a signal with its key property. The Ecore library receives the signal and propagates it to application layers as an event. The EFL extension library consumes the events and handles the views of the application according to key properties. Otherwise, EFL extension manages the rotary events, which are generated from rotary components in wearable devices and delivered to application layers by defining an event callback or a handler function, and registering it.