Develop Reference

How do I pass arguments to a Dialog box in Android?

Google decided to make a single-threaded user interface that doesn't have modal dialogs. I'm sure most of you have found that nothing updates until your function returns because everything is event driven on a single thread (by "law").
If I have a simple alert-box, such as "Are You Sure?" (example only), with a Yes and No button, then I have to assign callbacks to the buttons rather than having a simple return value (no modal dialogs). That's fine, even though a return value would vastly simplify my problem (arguments stay local to the caller), although this would stop the calling activity from responding (modal).
Imagine now if I have a list of items and the user attempts to perform some operation. The dialog must now have some way to pass WHICH item I want to perform the operation on to the button's callback, but I can't seem to find any mechanism in the API for passing this along to the onclick handler. Using non-local variables is a work-around, but messy.
How can I pass this information along cleanly? Does anyone have some sort of hack that would somehow "fake" a modal dialog that can return a value (I'm not seeing how).

Create a custom dialog that extends the default android Dialog and add the information you need and pass on the constructor.
See more here: How can I pass values between a Dialog and an Activity?

I am not sure what exactly what do you want to achieve. Not sure if your problems is in the communication between the activity to the dialog or dialog to the activity or both.
Anyway, I have some experience on Android and I really recommend you to achieve the communication between activities, fragments, even dialog (DialogFragments) to use one of these libraries. At the beggining could be a little bit hard to understand how work, but the result is faster and cleaner code, of course offers you more flexibility.
Take a look to:
https://github.com/beworker/tinybus --> less used but it is awesome
https://github.com/greenrobot/EventBus --> more extended and used for the community
Hope to help you!

In a situation like this, I Created a new string array entry in the strings.xml in values folder like this:
<string-array name="array">
<item>1</item>
<item>2</item>
</string-array>
And then create a dialog using Dialog builder like this:
AlertDialog.Builder dialog=new AlertDialog.Builder(this);
LayoutInflater infl=this.getLayoutInflater();
Resources res=getResources();
dialog.setSingleChoiceItems(R.array.alphabets, 0,new OnClickListener() {
public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
mReturnVariable=which;
}
});
dialog.create().show();
So the mReturnVariable contains the user selected item index .Hope that solves the problem

I passed the required arguments to the Alert Dialog using View Binding in Android Latest version.
private ConnectDialogBinding connectDialogBinding;
private String chargerID;
private void connectDialog() {
// Create the object of
// AlertDialog Builder class
AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(ConnectActivity.this);
connectDialogBinding = ConnectDialogBinding.inflate(getLayoutInflater());
builder.setView(connectDialogBinding.getRoot());
connectDialogBinding.txtID.setText(chargerID);
builder.setCancelable(false);
// Create the Alert dialog
AlertDialog alertDialog = builder.create();
// Show the Alert Dialog box
alertDialog.show();
connectDialogBinding.cancelBtn.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
#Override
public void onClick(View v) {
alertDialog.cancel();
}
});
}
enter image description here

Displaying an array of objects, one at a time through a single dialog... instead of several dialogs

In my application I have a list of questions stored in an ArrayList, and I want to display a dialog that shows one question, and then continues to the next one after the question is answered. The way that I'm currently doing it (iterating through a loop) hasn't been working because it just layers all of the dialogs on top of one another all at once which causes a host of other issues. What I'm looking for is a way to still iterate through the questions, but just change the layout of the dialog each time until it has finished each question in the list. Can anyone give me a good pointer for how to get this going?

You can make a function that takes title and message as parameters and shows a dialog.
showDialog(String title, String message){ // Show dialog code here}
Within that dialog's answer button's listener call another function (showQuestion(currentQuestion)) that iterates the arrayList till it is over
int currentQuestion=0;
ArrayList<QuestionObject> questionList;
showQuestion(int i){
if(i<questionList.size()){
showDialog(questionList.get(i).getTitle,questionList.get(i).getMessage);
currentQuestion++;
}else{
//quiz is over
}
}

I assume you mean that you just want to change 1 single layout(created within XML i.e main.xml). In order to do this, make sure that the class your working on is pointing to that layout. From there (assuming your using an Event listener for when the user submits an answer) you can change do as you want by the following:
TextView txt = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.textView); // references the txt XML element
and in your Event listener, if the answer is correct then change(Have i be a global variable thats initially set to 0).
if(i<arrayList.size()){
txt.setText(arrayList.get(++i));
}else{
txt.setText("You Finished");
}
From there, in the else statement, you can change arrayLists and reset i to 0;

If you are trying to use the positive, neutral, and negative buttons; then you may have problems with multiple dialogs. Try defining a customized layout with your own TextViews, ListViews, and Buttons. You can implement listeners and everything else like a regular layout. Then just pass your customized layout to the dialog through AlertDialog.Builder.setView().
PS If you include code examples of what you are currently doing we can provided answers that are less vague.

AlertDialog vs Spinner vs ListView

I've got what I thought was a simple android UI design problem but I've been going around in circles for a couple of days. I have a REST service that I'm downloading XML from and displaying the XML in a form in an android app. I have a web page built and am mimicking this with android, same options, same URLs being sent to the REST service whether from android or the web pages. With HTML I can easily create checkbox groups and radiobutton/dropdowns for various id/display items, so for instance, I can display a planet option as:
<select name="planet"><option value="0">Mercury</option></select>
I wanted to do something similar in android where I had a pair of values, one an id and the other the user-friendly text to display. So I decided to create an adapter using android.util.Pair:
public class PairView extends Pair<String, String> {
public PairView(String first, String second) {
super(first, second);
}
public String toString() {
return second;
}
}
public class PairAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<PairView> {
}
So now I can put my id in pair.first and what to display to the user in pair.second.
My problem comes in that some of these options will be single-selects and some will be multi-selects. In html, that's not an issue, just use a checkbox group for multi, and radio buttons/dropdowns for single selects. In android however, it seems it's not so straight forward. I tried using Spinners for the adapters, but Spinner seems to only allow single selection. AlertDialog.Builder allows for single and multi-selections, but curiously I don't see an option for using an adapter for the multi-selection, just for single selections.
I guess what I really want is a consistent look for all my options, with radio buttons displayed for single selections and checkboxes displayed for multi selections, via an adapter so I can get the id's from the Pair for the items selected.
What approach should I use? A custom spinner with code added for multi-selections? AlertDialog.Builder and somehow make it use an adapter for multi-selections? Just create a plain Alert and wrap a ListView in it? Another option that is (hopefully) simpler?
I feel like I'm missing something very basic here.

I had a similar situation in an app I was making so would share what I opted for. I had different type of questions and depending on that I removed and added things in my activity. For radio buttons I used with elements in it. For multiple choice questions I wanted a checkbox based view so I added an empty within my layout and in code added CheckBox(s) to it.
As for the caption and value, for radio buttons and checkboxes you can set display text by setText and add any object/value as a tag. So what I used to do was something like this:
CheckBox option = new CheckBox(MyActivity.this);
option.setText("Option 1");
option.setTag(10);
Later on when you get the selected option, you can simply get its tag and use its value.
This is just one way of doing it which I found simple. Hope this helps

How to update array of items in an AlertDialog list built with AlertDialog.builder after creation

I have created a dialog that shows a multi-choice list of items that can be checked, using AlertDialog.builder.
I set the initial set of item names and their checked state thus:
builder.setMultiChoiceItems( saveTargets.names, saveTargets.checked, new DialogInterface.OnMultiChoiceClickListener() {
In my dialog I have added a button that creates a new item that should be shown and be selectable in the multi-choice list.
How can I ask the Dialog to update the list to show the new item?
I have it added to my "saveTargets" variables, but need toset the new data into the list view in the alert dialog.
I tried using a cursor to setup the multi-choice. I can't use that now for other reasons.
I've looked at getting the ListView and the Adaptor from the alert dialog, but can't see any calls to renew the array of names and checked status.

I needed to do something like this as well. After looking on google, stackoverflow and the documentation, it looks like it relatively impossible to do without making your own adapter to handle the list (see: How to customize the list items in an Android AlertDialog). Since I only needed this for a single dialog, I ended up doing what the documentation says don't do: I made an alertdialog in my own method and did not make it part of "onCreateDialog" in my activity (I had to do this for a series of dialogs for another class in my app as well). This way the dialog is recreated from scratch each time it is called so the list is updated each time. That was the easiest fix I could find personally. Not as clean, maybe, but easier to add and works like it should.

How to use setMultiChoiceItems() with a Custom AlertDialog that uses an efficiency arrayadapter?

I am writing a music player that uses a custom Adapter extending BaseAdapter (efficiency adapter) that I want to display in an AlertDialog using setAdapter() where the user can either click on one of the songs to switch to that position in the playlist OR check songs to remove from the playlist. I tried using a custom click listener so that a user could just long click to remove the item from the list but the listview just doesn't work right... it was removing the wrong items (the ones at the end) even though the ArrayList contained the correct playlist items... (when I removed the item from the ArrayList, I passed it to the adapter which called notifyDataSetChanged... but that just didn't work as I mentioned. There is definitely a bug in the AlertDialog ListView... because there is no reason for it to have popped off the results from the end rather than the correct item.
So... the next method I would like to try is to use the setMultiChoiceItems() method of the AlertDialog... but it appears that it doesn't work with a custom adapter... only simple arrays. Will I have to subclass AlertDialog and Override the setMultiChoiceItems() method or is there a way I can make it work with an ArrayAdapter?
Basically, I can't figure out how to even iterate the list that the AlertDialog creates or whether it even passes that view somehow. In addition, I don't think I can even listen to clicks on checkboxes if I add those to the row. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
EDIT: Asking questions here is like magic... I answered my own question... this is how I did it. I added a hint to each checkbox which is the position of the item in the ArrayList. Then I used OnCheckedChangeListener to capture the selections. When you set a hint it adds text to the checkbox... since the background of the AlertDialog is white (even for clicked items?) I just set the hint text color to transparent.
holder.check.setHintTextColor(Color.TRANSPARENT);
holder.check.setHint(String.valueOf(position));
holder.check.setOnCheckedChangeListener(new OnCheckedChangeListener() {
public void onCheckedChanged(CompoundButton buttonView,
boolean isChecked) {
int position = Integer.parseInt((String) buttonView.getHint());
Log.v("onCheckedChanged", "Checked: "+isChecked+" returned: "+position+" which should be "+getItem(position).name);
}
});

Refer This and This
then
Pass a reference to byte[] in setMultiChoiceItems().
final boolean[] booleans = {false, true, false, true, false, false, false};
Then check the value of booleans inside setPositiveButton().
If you need to pass this AlertDialog around, then extend AlertDialog and have create a field boolean as described in 1.