My question is about best practices in Android in terms of using ScrollView to scroll other views and widgets. This is to know when to use a ScrollView to eliminate redundancy of scrolling if scrolling is possible in a given widget/view/layouts.
So I notice that there are instances where I don't really need to use ScrollView to make things scrollable. Few of the widgets/views/layouts that I know of are TextView and ListView. This is supported according to this documentation.
You should never use a ScrollView with a ListView, because ListView takes care of its own vertical scrolling. Most importantly, doing this defeats all of the important optimizations in ListView for dealing with large lists, since it effectively forces the ListView to display its entire list of items to fill up the infinite container supplied by ScrollView.
The TextView class also takes care of its own scrolling, so does not require a ScrollView, but using the two together is possible to achieve the effect of a text view within a larger container.
My question is, are there other widgets/views/layouts that handles their own scrolling other than the two I have stated above and the documentation has. Maybe there are others that are scrollable or other methods to make things scrollable other than the default of some widgets and by using the ScrollView.
Preferred answers must be base on experience and documentation (other than what I've shown). Thanks in advance for any good answers.
WebView is one other class that does its own scrolling. My "best practice" advice is to use ScrollView to add scrolling to an arrangement (usually vertical) of fixed-size widgets. As you have noted, variable-sized widgets such as ListView provide their own scrolling.
if you read the official documentation you will find that tell you when not to use ScrollView:
You should never use a ScrollView with a ListView, ListView Because Takes Care of Its Own Vertical scrolling. Most importantly, doing all of the defeats esta Important optimizations in ListView for dealing with large lists, since it forces the ListView Effectively to displays its Entire list of items to fill up the container supplied by ScrollView infinite.
More information here.
Related
This is not a design question, I have the item designed. I am confused on how to pull it off.
I am tasked with designing a view for Android that has a view of a user's post and the comments under it. The post contains some extra information and widely different design from the comments, but all of them need to scroll in tandem, like a web page would (Oh, how I am spoiled by my years of web dev...).
My current solution is to nest a LinearLayout (at the top of the view to contain the user's post) and a RecyclerView (below the post to display the comments) inside a vertical ScrollView. The information is actually displayed, but the RecyclerView, of course, scrolls independently of the LinearLayout above it and ruins the functionality of the view.
I wish, if possible, to keep the RecyclerView in use
The best case scenario would be to have the LinearLayout with the post scroll a certain amount, and then the RecyclerView take over. However, I don't want to poison my codebase with 200+ ugly lines of code to achieve this, so if this is a laborious task to complete, I would rather look for alternatives.
The first thing to understand is: do you really need a RecyclerView, or even better, do you really need recycling?
If the answer is yes, the way to go is two different item types in the RecyclerView's Adapter (for more details, see here or here). This concept was already present in the ListView: the main difference is that RecyclerView enforce the use of the View Holder pattern. It is not so complex, and, more importantly, is the way the RecyclerView is supposed to solve that problem. Depending on your UI design, you may also want to have different view types for different types of comments (plain text, images, ...). Remember that, when the RecyclerView is included in a ScrollView, the recycling won't work, because all the items in it will be drawn at once to compute the height of the content of the parent ScrollView.
If the answer is no, then you could just create your views at runtime and add them to a parent LinearLayout in a ScrollView. It is really nothing more than a for loop.
A more fancy approach would be to use an ItemDecoration for the user's post, but I don't see any specific advantage in this case.
I´m facing the implementation of a View where I have to load perhaps almost 100 items in a list. I have a doubt in which maybe the best way to implement it.
I already know that ListView recycles the views and ScrollView keeps all in memory. The point is that I was thinking in apply paging to the Scrollview to avoid huge loading times when the app inflates all items.
Applications as Google+, Facebook, twitter or Linkedin, Do you think they use ListView?
Thanks
ListView is definitely the way to go. It's easier to use than ScrollView, and a paging system doesn't fit in with the style of android.
ListView is meant to create a list of varrying lengths based of an array of information. ScrollView is for having a (usually) set amount of children in the View (defined in the layout xml).
ListViews do not inflate all items, they inflate however many can fit on a page at a time. Your fastest option, with or without paging is a ListView. However, if each child is completeley different, then ScrollView is the way to go.
I'm making a GUI with two different parts. The first part (at the top) is composed of some banners, several fixed buttons. So I think using LinearLayout is the most straightforward way to implement. The second part is composed of several similar items grouped together which can be implemented by using ExpandableListView, I think.
However the problem is that the content exceeds the screen size. So I intend to put two of them into a ScrollView. I checked several sources, it seems that putting "ExpandableListView" inside a ScroolView is NOT possible, or not efficent, so I'm afraid...
Would you help to confirm if this is possible? efficient ?
If no, would you give me some recommendations for this layout design?
I'm indeed looking forward to your supports.
Sincerely.
If you have a fixed header at the top of a list, use ListView's header view feature.
Putting ListViews in ScrollViews fundamentally makes no sense and here is why:
ListView has one purpose: to efficiently display unbounded data sets. Since these can be extremely large (tens of thousands of items and more) you do not want to create a View for each item up front. Instead, ListView asks its Adapter for Views only for the items that currently fit in the ListView's measured space on screen. When an item's View is scrolled out of sight, ListView disconnects that View and hands it back to the adapter to fill out with new data and reuse to show other items. (This is the convertView parameter to an Adapter's getView method.)
ScrollView also has one purpose: to take a single child view and give it "infinite" vertical space to fit within. The user can then scroll up and down to see the full content.
Now given this, how many item Views would a ListView create for a 100,000 item Adapter if it had infinite height available to fill? :)
By putting a ListView inside a ScrollView you defeat ListView's key purpose. The parent ScrollView will give the ListView effectively infinite height to work with, but ListView wants to have a bounded height so that it can provide a limited window into a large data set.
Well Expandable List View itself has scrollable property by placing it in scroll view is really undesirable.As the both scroll would contradict and smooth scrolling can't be obtained in that case..
If we have any data to be shown prior or later to list...
Best way is to use header and footer view to list...
I recommend you use header and footer in your case.
I'm researching creating a view for displaying EPG data. That is the view should:
have a fixed header column that shows the services,
have a fixed header row that shows the time and
a content area that has equal-height TextViews of flexible width for showing the actual EPG entries
Most importantly, scolling vertically must scroll header column as well, scrolling horizontally must scroll header row.
Apart from drawing the whole view myself (inside a scrollable?) I'm totally stumped if there is any good approach I could use involving linear layouts or such.
Any hints are greatly appreciated- please note that I'm and android beginner.
Approach 1: Everything (that is all views) are pre-generated.
Have top and left one-way ScrollViews together with a bidirectional ScrollView and have the scolling be synchronized ( Android: Synchronized scrolling of two different views ). Synchronized scrolling isn't to difficult to do if you've subclassing the ScrollViews and add your own ScrollManager to handle notifications.
Drawback: ScrollViews inside ScrollViews for the main content area do seem to be the desired option. The whole thing will become highly resource intensive as all items need to be created upfront to be available for scrolling.
Approach 1 takes care of view-synchronization for the scrolling, but is a huge resource hog (imagine an EPG with 30+ channels and 100+ events per channel).
Approach 2
One approach for this I could imagine would be- for the main content area- a ListView with a custom ArrayAdapter. Custom adapter would probably return a LinearLayout or similar holding the individual events. That way, scrolling would still work bidirectionally if the ListView is put into horizontal ScrollView and at least the LinearLayouts themselves could be recycled by the ListView.
Are there better approaches?
The documentation for HorizontalScrollView has the following:
You should never use a
HorizontalScrollView with a ListView,
since ListView takes care of its own
scrolling. Most importantly, doing
this defeats all of the important
optimizations in ListView for dealing
with large lists, since it effectively
forces the ListView to display its
entire list of items to fill up the
infinite container supplied by
HorizontalScrollView.
The reasoning here seems to apply to a (vertically scrolling) ScrollView, since ListView also scrolls vertically. But ScrollView doesn't have any such caveat. Did Google put this warning in the wrong class, or am I not understanding something?
Looks like it is a bug indeed: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=2781