Android offers a sophisticated and powerful componentized model for building your UI, based on
the fundamental layout classes
View
and
ViewGroup
. The platform includes a
variety of prebuilt View
and ViewGroup
subclasses—called widgets and
layouts, respectively—that you can use to construct your UI.
A partial list of available widgets includes Button
,
TextView
,
EditText
,
ListView
,
CheckBox
,
RadioButton
,
Gallery
,
Spinner
, and the more special-purpose
AutoCompleteTextView
,
ImageSwitcher
, and
TextSwitcher
.
Among the layouts available are
LinearLayout
,
FrameLayout
,
RelativeLayout
,
and others. For more examples, see
Common layouts.
If none of the prebuilt widgets or layouts meet your needs, you can create your own
View
subclass. If you only need to make small adjustments to an existing widget or
layout, you can subclass the widget or layout and override its methods.
Creating your own View
subclasses gives you precise control over the appearance and
function of a screen element. To give an idea of the control you get with custom views, here are
some examples of what you can do with them:
-
You can create a completely custom-rendered
View
type—for example, a "volume control" knob, rendered using 2D graphics, that resembles an analog electronic control. -
You can combine a group of
View
components into a new single component, perhaps to make something like a combo box (a combination of popup list and free entry text field), a dual-pane selector control (a left and right pane with a list in each where you can reassign which item is in which list), and so on. -
You can override the way an
EditText
component is rendered on the screen. The NotePad sample app uses this to good effect to create a lined notepad page. - You can capture other events—like key presses—and handle them in a custom way, such as for a game.
The following sections explain how to create custom views and use them in your application. For
detailed reference information, see the
View
class.
The basic approach
Here is a high-level overview of what you need to know to create your own View
components:
-
Extend an existing
View
class or subclass with your own class. -
Override some of the methods from the superclass. The superclass methods to override start with
on
—for example,onDraw()
,onMeasure()
, andonKeyDown()
. This is similar to theon
events inActivity
orListActivity
that you override for lifecycle and other functionality hooks. - Use your new extension class. Once completed, you can use your new extension class in place of the view it was based on.
Fully customized components
You can create fully customized graphical components that appear however you want. Perhaps you want a graphical VU meter that looks like an old analog gauge, or a sing-along text view where a bouncing ball moves along the words as you sing along with a karaoke machine. You might want something that the built-in components can't do, no matter how you combine them.
Fortunately, you can create components that look and behave any way you want, limited only by your imagination, the size of the screen, and the available processing power, bearing in mind that your application might have to run on something with significantly less power than your desktop workstation.
To create a fully customized component, consider the following:
-
The most generic view you can extend is
View
, so you usually start by extending this to create your new super component. - You can supply a constructor, which can take attributes and parameters from the XML, and you can consume your own such attributes and parameters, such as the color and range of the VU meter or the width and damping of the needle.
- You probably want to create your own event listeners, property accessors, and modifiers as well as more sophisticated behavior in your component class.
-
You almost certainly want to override
onMeasure()
and are also likely to need to overrideonDraw()
if you want the component to show something. While both have default behavior, the defaultonDraw()
does nothing, and the defaultonMeasure()
always sets a size of 100x100, which you probably don't want. -
You can also override other
on
methods, as required.
Extend onDraw() and onMeasure()
The onDraw()
method delivers a
Canvas
on which you can
implement anything you want: 2D graphics, other standard or custom components, styled text, or
anything else you can think of.
onMeasure()
is a little more involved. onMeasure()
is a critical piece
of the rendering contract between your component and its container. onMeasure()
must be
overridden to efficiently and accurately report the measurements of its contained parts. This is
made slightly more complex by the limit requirements from the parent—which are passed into the
onMeasure()
method—and by the requirement to call the
setMeasuredDimension()
method with the measured width and height once they are
calculated. If you don't call this method from an overridden onMeasure()
method, it
results in an exception at measurement time.
At a high level, implementing onMeasure()
looks something like this:
-
The overridden
onMeasure()
method is called with width and height specifications, which are treated as requirements for the restrictions on the width and height measurements you produce.widthMeasureSpec
andheightMeasureSpec
parameters are both integer codes representing dimensions. A full reference to the kind of restrictions these specifications can require can be found in the reference documentation underView.onMeasure(int, int)
This reference documentation also explains the whole measurement operation. -
Your component's
onMeasure()
method calculates a measurement width and height, which are required to render the component. It must try to stay within the specifications passed in, although it can exceed them. In this case, the parent can choose what to do, including clipping, scrolling, throwing an exception, or asking theonMeasure()
to try again, perhaps with different measurement specifications. -
When the width and height are calculated, call the
setMeasuredDimension(int width, int height)
method with the calculated measurements. Failure to do this results in an exception.
Here's a summary of other standard methods that the framework calls on views:
Category | Methods | Description |
---|---|---|
Creation | Constructors | There is a form of the constructor that is called when the view is created from code and a form that is called when the view is inflated from a layout file. The second form parses and applies attributes defined in the layout file. |
|
Called after a view and all of its children are inflated from XML. | |
Layout |
|
Called to determine the size requirements for this view and all of its children. |
|
Called when this view must assign a size and position to all of its children. | |
|
Called when the size of this view is changed. | |
Drawing |
|
Called when the view must render its content. |
Event processing |
|
Called when a key down event occurs. |
|
Called when a key up event occurs. | |
|
Called when a trackball motion event occurs. | |
|
Called when a touchscreen motion event occurs. | |
Focus |
|
Called when the view gains or loses focus. |
|
Called when the window containing the view gains or loses focus. | |
Attaching |
|
Called when the view is attached to a window. |
|
Called when the view is detached from its window. | |
|
Called when the visibility of the window containing the view is changed. |
Compound controls
If you don't want to create a completely customized component but instead are looking to put
together a reusable component consisting of a group of existing controls, then creating a compound
component (or compound control) might be best. In summary, this brings together a number of more
atomic controls or views into a logical group of items that can be treated as a single thing.
For example, a combo box can be a combination of a single line EditText
field
and an adjacent button with an attached popup list. If the user taps the button and selects something from
the list, it populates the EditText
field, but they can also type something
directly into the EditText
if they prefer.
In Android, there are two other views readily available to do this: Spinner
and
AutoCompleteTextView
. Regardless, this concept for a combo box makes a good example.
To create a compound component, do the following:
-
Just like with an
Activity
, use either the declarative (XML-based) approach to create the contained components or nest them programmatically from your code. The usual starting point is aLayout
of some kind, so create a class that extends aLayout
. In the case of a combo box, you might use aLinearLayout
with horizontal orientation. You can nest other layouts inside, so the compound component can be arbitrarily complex and structured. -
In the constructor for the new class, take whatever parameters the superclass expects and pass
them through to the superclass constructor first. Then, you can set up the other views to use
within your new component. This is where you create the
EditText
field and the popup list. You might introduce your own attributes and parameters into the XML that your constructor can pull and use. -
Optionally, create listeners for events that your contained views might generate. An example is a
listener method for the list item click listener to update the contents of the
EditText
if a list selection is made. -
Optionally, create your own properties with accessors and modifiers. For example, let the
EditText
value be set initially in the component and query for its contents when needed. -
Optionally, override
onDraw()
andonMeasure()
. This is usually not necessary when extending aLayout
, since the layout has default behavior that likely works fine. -
Optionally, override other
on
methods, likeonKeyDown()
, for example to choose certain default values from the popup list of a combo box when a certain key is tapped.
There are advantages to using a Layout
as the basis for a custom control,
including the following:
- You can specify the layout using the declarative XML files, just like with an activity screen, or you can create views programmatically and nest them into the layout from your code.
-
The
onDraw()
andonMeasure()
methods, plus most of the otheron
methods, have suitable behavior, so you don't have to override them. - You can quickly construct arbitrarily complex compound views and re-use them as if they were a single component.
Modify an existing view type
If there is a component that is similar to what you want, you can extend that component and override
the behavior that you want to change. You can do all the things you do with a fully customized
component, but by starting with a more specialized class in the View
hierarchy, you can
get some behavior that does what you want for free.
For example, the
NotePad
sample app demonstrates many aspects of using the Android platform. Among them is extending an
EditText
view to make a lined notepad. This isn't a perfect example, and the APIs for
doing this might change, but it demonstrates the principles.
If you haven't done so already, import the NotePad sample into Android Studio or look at the
source using the link provided. In particular, see the definition of LinedEditText
in the
NoteEditor.java
file.
Here are some things to note in this file:
-
The definition
The class is defined with the following line:
public static class LinedEditText extends EditText
LinedEditText
is defined as an inner class within theNoteEditor
activity, but it is public so that it can be accessed asNoteEditor.LinedEditText
from outside theNoteEditor
class.Also,
LinedEditText
isstatic
, meaning it doesn't generate the so-called "synthetic methods" that let it access data from the parent class. This means it behaves as a separate class rather than something strongly related toNoteEditor
. This is a cleaner way to create inner classes if they don't need access to state from the outer class. It keeps the generated class small and lets it be used easily from other classes.LinedEditText
extendsEditText
, which is the view to customize in this case. When you finish, the new class can substitute for a normalEditText
view. -
Class initialization
As always, the super is called first. This isn't a default constructor, but it is a parameterized one. The
EditText
is created with these parameters when it is inflated from an XML layout file. Thus, the constructor needs to take them and pass them to the superclass constructor as well. -
Overridden methods
This example overrides only the
onDraw()
method, but you might need to override others as you create your own custom components.For this sample, overriding the
onDraw()
method lets you paint the blue lines on theEditText
view canvas. The canvas is passed into the overriddenonDraw()
method. Thesuper.onDraw()
method is called before the method ends. The superclass method must be invoked. In this case, invoke it at the end after you paint the lines you want to include. -
Custom component
You now have your custom component, but how can you use it? In the NotePad example, the custom component is used directly from the declarative layout, so look at
note_editor.xml
in theres/layout
folder:<view xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" class="com.example.android.notepad.NoteEditor$LinedEditText" android:id="@+id/note" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" android:background="@android:color/transparent" android:padding="5dp" android:scrollbars="vertical" android:fadingEdge="vertical" android:gravity="top" android:textSize="22sp" android:capitalize="sentences" />
The custom component is created as a generic view in the XML, and the class is specified using the full package. The inner class you define is referenced using the
NoteEditor$LinedEditText
notation, which is a standard way to refer to inner classes in the Java programming language.If your custom view component isn't defined as an inner class, you can declare the view component with the XML element name and exclude the
class
attribute. For example:<com.example.android.notepad.LinedEditText id="@+id/note" ... />
Notice that the
LinedEditText
class is now a separate class file. When the class is nested in theNoteEditor
class, this technique doesn't work.The other attributes and parameters in the definition are the ones passed into the custom component constructor and then passed through to the
EditText
constructor, so they are the same parameters you use for anEditText
view. It's possible to add your own parameters as well.
Creating custom components is only as complicated as you need it to be.
A more sophisticated component can override even more on
methods and introduce its
own helper methods, substantially customizing its properties and behavior. The only limit is your
imagination and what you need the component to do.