View

Class Overview

This class represents the basic building block for user interface components. A View occupies a rectangular area on the screen and is responsible for drawing and event handling. View is the base class for widgets, which are used to create interactive UI components (buttons, text fields, etc.). The ViewGroup subclass is the base class for layouts, which are invisible containers that hold other Views (or other ViewGroups) and define their layout properties.

Using Views

All of the views in a window are arranged in a single tree. You can add views either from code or by specifying a tree of views in one or more XML layout files. There are many specialized subclasses of views that act as controls or are capable of displaying text, images, or other content.

Once you have created a tree of views, there are typically a few types of common operations you may wish to perform:

• Set properties: for example setting the text of a TextView. The available properties and the methods that set them will vary among the different subclasses of views. Note that properties that are known at build time can be set in the XML layout files.
• Set focus: The framework will handled moving focus in response to user input. To force focus to a specific view, call requestFocus().
• Set up listeners: Views allow clients to set listeners that will be notified when something interesting happens to the view. For example, all views will let you set a listener to be notified when the view gains or loses focus. You can register such a listener using setOnFocusChangeListener(android.view.View.OnFocusChangeListener). Other view subclasses offer more specialized listeners. For example, a Button exposes a listener to notify clients when the button is clicked.
• Set visibility: You can hide or show views using setVisibility(int).

Note: The Android framework is responsible for measuring, laying out and drawing views. You should not call methods that perform these actions on views yourself unless you are actually implementing a ViewGroup.

Implementing a Custom View

To implement a custom view, you will usually begin by providing overrides for some of the standard methods that the framework calls on all views. You do not need to override all of these methods. In fact, you can start by just overriding onDraw(android.graphics.Canvas).

IDs

• Define a Button in the layout file and assign it a unique ID.

   <Button
       android:id="@+id/my_button"
       android:layout_width="wrap_content"
       android:layout_height="wrap_content"
       android:text="@string/my_button_text"/>
   

• From the onCreate method of an Activity, find the Button

        Button myButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.my_button);
   

View IDs need not be unique throughout the tree, but it is good practice to ensure that they are at least unique within the part of the tree you are searching.

Position

The geometry of a view is that of a rectangle. A view has a location, expressed as a pair of left and top coordinates, and two dimensions, expressed as a width and a height. The unit for location and dimensions is the pixel.

It is possible to retrieve the location of a view by invoking the methods getLeft() and getTop(). The former returns the left, or X, coordinate of the rectangle representing the view. The latter returns the top, or Y, coordinate of the rectangle representing the view. These methods both return the location of the view relative to its parent. For instance, when getLeft() returns 20, that means the view is located 20 pixels to the right of the left edge of its direct parent.

In addition, several convenience methods are offered to avoid unnecessary computations, namely getRight() and getBottom(). These methods return the coordinates of the right and bottom edges of the rectangle representing the view. For instance, calling getRight() is similar to the following computation: getLeft() + getWidth() (see Size for more information about the width.)

Size, padding and margins

The size of a view is expressed with a width and a height. A view actually possess two pairs of width and height values.

The first pair is known as measured width and measured height. These dimensions define how big a view wants to be within its parent (see Layout for more details.) The measured dimensions can be obtained by calling getMeasuredWidth() and getMeasuredHeight().

The second pair is simply known as width and height, or sometimes drawing width and drawing height. These dimensions define the actual size of the view on screen, at drawing time and after layout. These values may, but do not have to, be different from the measured width and height. The width and height can be obtained by calling getWidth() and getHeight().

To measure its dimensions, a view takes into account its padding. The padding is expressed in pixels for the left, top, right and bottom parts of the view. Padding can be used to offset the content of the view by a specific amount of pixels. For instance, a left padding of 2 will push the view's content by 2 pixels to the right of the left edge. Padding can be set using the setPadding(int, int, int, int) or setPaddingRelative(int, int, int, int) method and queried by calling getPaddingLeft(), getPaddingTop(), getPaddingRight(), getPaddingBottom(), getPaddingStart(), getPaddingEnd().

Even though a view can define a padding, it does not provide any support for margins. However, view groups provide such a support. Refer to ViewGroup and ViewGroup.MarginLayoutParams for further information.

Layout

Layout is a two pass process: a measure pass and a layout pass. The measuring pass is implemented in measure(int, int) and is a top-down traversal of the view tree. Each view pushes dimension specifications down the tree during the recursion. At the end of the measure pass, every view has stored its measurements. The second pass happens in layout(int, int, int, int) and is also top-down. During this pass each parent is responsible for positioning all of its children using the sizes computed in the measure pass.

When a view's measure() method returns, its getMeasuredWidth() and getMeasuredHeight() values must be set, along with those for all of that view's descendants. A view's measured width and measured height values must respect the constraints imposed by the view's parents. This guarantees that at the end of the measure pass, all parents accept all of their children's measurements. A parent view may call measure() more than once on its children. For example, the parent may measure each child once with unspecified dimensions to find out how big they want to be, then call measure() on them again with actual numbers if the sum of all the children's unconstrained sizes is too big or too small.

The measure pass uses two classes to communicate dimensions. The View.MeasureSpec class is used by views to tell their parents how they want to be measured and positioned. The base LayoutParams class just describes how big the view wants to be for both width and height. For each dimension, it can specify one of:

• an exact number
• MATCH_PARENT, which means the view wants to be as big as its parent (minus padding)
• WRAP_CONTENT, which means that the view wants to be just big enough to enclose its content (plus padding).

MeasureSpecs are used to push requirements down the tree from parent to child. A MeasureSpec can be in one of three modes:

• UNSPECIFIED: This is used by a parent to determine the desired dimension of a child view. For example, a LinearLayout may call measure() on its child with the height set to UNSPECIFIED and a width of EXACTLY 240 to find out how tall the child view wants to be given a width of 240 pixels.
• EXACTLY: This is used by the parent to impose an exact size on the child. The child must use this size, and guarantee that all of its descendants will fit within this size.
• AT_MOST: This is used by the parent to impose a maximum size on the child. The child must gurantee that it and all of its descendants will fit within this size.

To intiate a layout, call requestLayout(). This method is typically called by a view on itself when it believes that is can no longer fit within its current bounds.

Drawing

Drawing is handled by walking the tree and rendering each view that intersects the invalid region. Because the tree is traversed in-order, this means that parents will draw before (i.e., behind) their children, with siblings drawn in the order they appear in the tree. If you set a background drawable for a View, then the View will draw it for you before calling back to its onDraw() method.

Note that the framework will not draw views that are not in the invalid region.

To force a view to draw, call invalidate().

Event Handling and Threading

The basic cycle of a view is as follows:

1. An event comes in and is dispatched to the appropriate view. The view handles the event and notifies any listeners.
2. If in the course of processing the event, the view's bounds may need to be changed, the view will call requestLayout().
3. Similarly, if in the course of processing the event the view's appearance may need to be changed, the view will call invalidate().
4. If either requestLayout() or invalidate() were called, the framework will take care of measuring, laying out, and drawing the tree as appropriate.

Note: The entire view tree is single threaded. You must always be on the UI thread when calling any method on any view. If you are doing work on other threads and want to update the state of a view from that thread, you should use a Handler.

Focus Handling

The framework will handle routine focus movement in response to user input. This includes changing the focus as views are removed or hidden, or as new views become available. Views indicate their willingness to take focus through the isFocusable() method. To change whether a view can take focus, call setFocusable(boolean). When in touch mode (see notes below) views indicate whether they still would like focus via isFocusableInTouchMode() and can change this via setFocusableInTouchMode(boolean).

Focus movement is based on an algorithm which finds the nearest neighbor in a given direction. In rare cases, the default algorithm may not match the intended behavior of the developer. In these situations, you can provide explicit overrides by using these XML attributes in the layout file:

 nextFocusDown
 nextFocusLeft
 nextFocusRight
 nextFocusUp
 

To get a particular view to take focus, call requestFocus().

Touch Mode

When a user is navigating a user interface via directional keys such as a D-pad, it is necessary to give focus to actionable items such as buttons so the user can see what will take input. If the device has touch capabilities, however, and the user begins interacting with the interface by touching it, it is no longer necessary to always highlight, or give focus to, a particular view. This motivates a mode for interaction named 'touch mode'.

For a touch capable device, once the user touches the screen, the device will enter touch mode. From this point onward, only views for which isFocusableInTouchMode() is true will be focusable, such as text editing widgets. Other views that are touchable, like buttons, will not take focus when touched; they will only fire the on click listeners.

Any time a user hits a directional key, such as a D-pad direction, the view device will exit touch mode, and find a view to take focus, so that the user may resume interacting with the user interface without touching the screen again.

The touch mode state is maintained across Activitys. Call isInTouchMode() to see whether the device is currently in touch mode.

Scrolling

The framework provides basic support for views that wish to internally scroll their content. This includes keeping track of the X and Y scroll offset as well as mechanisms for drawing scrollbars. See scrollBy(int, int), scrollTo(int, int), and awakenScrollBars() for more details.

Tags

Unlike IDs, tags are not used to identify views. Tags are essentially an extra piece of information that can be associated with a view. They are most often used as a convenience to store data related to views in the views themselves rather than by putting them in a separate structure.

Properties

The View class exposes an ALPHA property, as well as several transform-related properties, such as TRANSLATION_X and TRANSLATION_Y. These properties are available both in the Property form as well as in similarly-named setter/getter methods (such as setAlpha(float) for ALPHA). These properties can be used to set persistent state associated with these rendering-related properties on the view. The properties and methods can also be used in conjunction with Animator-based animations, described more in the Animation section.

Animation

Starting with Android 3.0, the preferred way of animating views is to use the android.animation package APIs. These Animator-based classes change actual properties of the View object, such as alpha and translationX. This behavior is contrasted to that of the pre-3.0 Animation-based classes, which instead animate only how the view is drawn on the display. In particular, the ViewPropertyAnimator class makes animating these View properties particularly easy and efficient.

Alternatively, you can use the pre-3.0 animation classes to animate how Views are rendered. You can attach an Animation object to a view using setAnimation(Animation) or startAnimation(Animation). The animation can alter the scale, rotation, translation and alpha of a view over time. If the animation is attached to a view that has children, the animation will affect the entire subtree rooted by that node. When an animation is started, the framework will take care of redrawing the appropriate views until the animation completes.

Security

Sometimes it is essential that an application be able to verify that an action is being performed with the full knowledge and consent of the user, such as granting a permission request, making a purchase or clicking on an advertisement. Unfortunately, a malicious application could try to spoof the user into performing these actions, unaware, by concealing the intended purpose of the view. As a remedy, the framework offers a touch filtering mechanism that can be used to improve the security of views that provide access to sensitive functionality.

To enable touch filtering, call setFilterTouchesWhenObscured(boolean) or set the android:filterTouchesWhenObscured layout attribute to true. When enabled, the framework will discard touches that are received whenever the view's window is obscured by another visible window. As a result, the view will not receive touches whenever a toast, dialog or other window appears above the view's window.

For more fine-grained control over security, consider overriding the onFilterTouchEventForSecurity(MotionEvent) method to implement your own security policy. See also FLAG_WINDOW_IS_OBSCURED.

Summary

[Expand] Inherited Methods
From class java.lang.Object Object clone() Creates and returns a copy of this Object. boolean equals(Object o) Compares this instance with the specified object and indicates if they are equal. void finalize() Invoked when the garbage collector has detected that this instance is no longer reachable. final Class<?> getClass() Returns the unique instance of Class that represents this object's class. int hashCode() Returns an integer hash code for this object. final void notify() Causes a thread which is waiting on this object's monitor (by means of calling one of the wait() methods) to be woken up. final void notifyAll() Causes all threads which are waiting on this object's monitor (by means of calling one of the wait() methods) to be woken up. String toString() Returns a string containing a concise, human-readable description of this object. final void wait() Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object. final void wait(long millis, int nanos) Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object or until the specified timeout expires. final void wait(long millis) Causes the calling thread to wait until another thread calls the notify() or notifyAll() method of this object or until the specified timeout expires.
From interface android.graphics.drawable.Drawable.Callback abstract void invalidateDrawable(Drawable who) Called when the drawable needs to be redrawn. abstract void scheduleDrawable(Drawable who, Runnable what, long when) A Drawable can call this to schedule the next frame of its animation. abstract void unscheduleDrawable(Drawable who, Runnable what) A Drawable can call this to unschedule an action previously scheduled with scheduleDrawable(Drawable, Runnable, long).
From interface android.view.KeyEvent.Callback abstract boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) Called when a key down event has occurred. abstract boolean onKeyLongPress(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) Called when a long press has occurred. abstract boolean onKeyMultiple(int keyCode, int count, KeyEvent event) Called when multiple down/up pairs of the same key have occurred in a row. abstract boolean onKeyUp(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) Called when a key up event has occurred.
From interface android.view.accessibility.AccessibilityEventSource abstract void sendAccessibilityEvent(int eventType) Handles the request for sending an AccessibilityEvent given the event type. abstract void sendAccessibilityEventUnchecked(AccessibilityEvent event) Handles the request for sending an AccessibilityEvent.