Saturday, 16 July 2011

Android User Interface Part 2

To build a compound control as shown below.
As in the previous post the steps are to 
1) Define the layout in xml.
2) Define a class to represent the layout in code.
3) Inflate the layout in code.
4) Set it to an activity.
The xml layout.
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The difference is in the attributes that are specified on the xml layout that allows the buttons or any other view to take up enough space as we need it to.
The layout specifies a editview, a list view and two buttons. The two buttons have their width set to 0 dip. The table row which has the button has a collective weight sum of 2. Each of the buttons has a weight of 1. So they occupy half the width each.
The layout class
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This is similar to the class in the previous blog but, here it is sub-classed from tablelayout. The rest is same.
Using this in an activity
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This is also the same as in previous post. Insatntiate a class of the layout just created with the activity as the context. Set it to the activity using 'setContentView' method. The method also shows how to use the arrayadapter to set values to a listview.
The advantage of using the xml layout is that, once it is defined and represented in a layout sub-class it can be used at multiple application activities on the run.

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