Using ArrayAdapter and ListView in Android Applications

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This week’s homework in the android class was to create a simple ListView using ArrayAdapter instead of generic ListAdapter.

ArrayAdapter

ArrayAdapter is a special kind of ListAdapter which supplies data to ListView. You can refer to my notes for last week to know about ListView and ListAdapter. You can also read about ArrayAdapter in android documentation.

Adding views

First create an empty android project. Then edit the main.xml layout file to add a ListView. Then create another layout xml file which will contain the TextView (or any component) that will be displayed within the ListView.

Editing Activity

The next step is to change the generated activity class to extend from ListActivity. This is very important because only a ListActivity will be able to display the ListView.

Binding the adapter

The next step is to bind the ArrayAdapter to the ListActivity. We can do this by calling the setListAdapter() method.

To this method we have to pass an object of type ArrayAdapter. You can pass an object reference to this method or we can even create a new anonymous method like below.

setListAdapter(new ArrayAdapter&lt;string&gt;(this, R.layout.list_item, strings) {
	@Override
	public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
		View row;
 
		if (null == convertView) {
			row = mInflater.inflate(R.layout.list_item, null);
		} else {
			row = convertView;
		}
 
		TextView tv = (TextView) row.findViewById(android.R.id.text1);
		tv.setText(getItem(position));
 
		return row;
	}
});

We have to override the getView() method of the ArrayAdapter class to create the TextView (or any other component) which will be created for each list.

Finishing up

So that’s it, you are done. All you have to do now is to save the project and run it in the emulator. If everything is done properly, then you can see the list of items displayed in the ListView like below.