Custom widget adapter based on XML layout

Lex from anddev.org pointed out an annoying property of my custom Weather adapter example: the view row the Weather objects are transformed to are encoded in Java instead of being defined in XML layout resource. This makes the weather display style harder to modify and every application using the WeatherAdapter has the same weather screen layout.

You can download the example program from here.

I created a new version of WeatherAdapter that takes an additional parameter in its constructor, an ID of a composite view (a LinearLayout in our case) that has three children views having the IDs "city", "temperature" and "sky" respectively. The code is flexible enough to handle the case when one or more of these child views are missing, in this case the field will simply not set from the Weather object. Check the res/layout/weather_row.xml file for an example.

The new version is indeed more flexible which is demonstrated by the bit more complicated display of weather rows. Thanks for the feedback, Lex, it really made this example program more valuable.

Posted in: adapter,UI,XML