How can I draw (bitmap, line, etc) outside the bounds of a view? From the view's onDraw(), I've read this is not possible as everything drawn will get clipped to the view's bounds.
I did come up with one solution but I'm hoping there's a better one. What does work is to create a transparent view that is at the top of the z order and includes the area I want to draw in (the entire app client area). Then, whenever I want to draw outside some child view, I can simply translate to the coordinates to the transparent view and draw there.
I also read about SurfaceView hoping that would do what I want. But I think it's main purpose is to provide drawing in a separate thread and doesn't solve the problem I'm discussing.
To be clear, it isn't sufficient to simply draw in the parent of the target view because other views in the parent will be higher in the z order and hide the drawing.
Intuition tells me there's a "right way" to do this. Anyone know?
I'm drawing the conclusion that the right way is to do what I proposed - create a transparent view that is at the top of the z-order for the space you need to draw in.
I come to this conclusion after learning how the Navigation Drawer drawing works - exactly in this way. So, if Google uses this technique, I conclude that it's the best way available.
Related
Basically I'm trying to make a change to an already drawn canvas. There is a portion of it that will change based on user input. Redrawing the entire canvas takes too much time, so I was thinking of making a separate canvas using the same view and holder, and just drawing the item that changes on top of the canvas. The bitmap I'm drawing over it appears to completely wipe out the previous canvas once drawn. Any way around this?
To ask a simpler question, I need to be able to draw on top of an existing view(surfaceview in this case) without erasing it.
That doesn't make much sense since the Canvas instance is a single one that is propagated top-down through the view hierarchy. If you want to refresh just a piece of your custom view, you can use methods such as view.invalidate(Rect) or view.invalidate(left, top, right, bottom).
I've been working on this for a while but can't find anything that exactly addresses my question (at least not something easy to understand).
I have a main layout XML file where I define various layout objects like a Button or a TextView (and I know I can add SurfaceView, View, and view and other things too). I want to draw a shape (in my case it's an arc) in just one of these objects so it doesn't take up the whole screen and so I can position it relative to other things.
(In my case it will ultimately re-draw the arc kind of like a circle with a gap in a different position every time I call a method depending on a value I pass to the method, but that's separate from my basic question.)
I know the answer will have something to do with a canvas, an onDraw method, maybe Paint, probably a view. I have been able to draw a circle from a custom View object by setting the main java file's layout as that View (as opposed to R.layouts.main), but that takes up the whole screen, and I'm unsure how I might be able to have that dynamically draw with modifications.
A really clear explanation or better yet an actual example would just be awesome.
As i see it u need to draw a specific shape on widget and not on complete screen. Try using layer List.
you can refer this link for sample Link
I am always confused about this and I need a pointer on how you would do it. If create a an xml layout with multiple imagesview and text view. And Lets say I want to draw line between two images and move an image along this line. How do I draw this line? I know I can get location of both images view so I have x1,y1 and x2,y2. My problem is with drawing.
Do I need surface view to have the drawing capabilities and loading bitmaps on the screen along the line?
If yes, then I guess I should always surface view to fill the screen and views on top just incase I need to draw which seems kinda wrong?
IF no (I hope thats the answer), then how do I draw lines, or load bitmaps on screen using only X,Y values?
I hope I was able to explain my confusion
Thanks
EDIT: Actually I thougth of a way of explaining my confusion better.
When you create an activity with xml layout you have something like
onCreate (){
setContentView(R.id.layout)
}
but when you have activity with drawing view you have something like
onCreate (){
SurfaceView v = new Surfaceview(this);
setContentView(v)
}
My problem is that we have to set the content layout to EITHER xml layout or to be drawing area . What if I want to set it to my xml layout and at the same time I can draw anywhere on the screen (over images view, empty areas, TextViews ..etc)
See my question?
That depends on what your desired result is and how much flexibility you need. You can have a look at this android Animations tutorial (the site is down at the time of posting but google has it cached).
If you don't need flexibility, then for your line, you might be able to create a View in your xml with an android:background fill color and a size that makes it look as you wish. You could then use an Animation on your bitmap's ImageView to translate it along the line, and use a listener on said Animation to show/hide the various Views as necessary at the beginning or end of your Animation.
If you need flexibility, the SurfaceView is probably your best bet.
I have a FrameLayout containing first a SurfaceView, and second a RelativeLayout which in turn contians various Buttons and TextViews.
Upon the canvas of the SurfaceView I am drawing numerous Bitmaps, and, via Touch and Motion Events am allowing the user to drag them around.
These Bitmaps, when dragged around pass underneath the Buttons etc that are inside the RelativeLayout.
Now, it's my (possibly mistaken) understanding that the "Z-level" of the SurfaceView, or whatever it has that passes for it, is entirely unrelated to the actual Z-level of the rest of the Layout. Is this the case? If so, how may I get around it, so that dragged Bitmaps are drawn ontop of other Views? Or what other way can I implement a full-screen canvas and yet not have my buttons etc act like the controls of an overlay.
I guess what I actually need is an underlay, where touch events can still be picked up by the Buttons etc underneath. But I don't know how to achieve this, as, when redrawing my Canvas, I have to also redraw the background.
Can I swap the order of the RelativeLayout and the SurfaceView inside the FrameLayout, and then make the background of the Canvas transparent? If so how? Will touch events still "fall through" to the buttons underneath?
Thanks for bearing with me, I know I'm a bit of a waffler.
SurfaceView doesn't work that way.
SurfaceView has two parts, the "view" part and the "surface" part. The "view" part is a transparent hole that is laid out with the other view elements, and composited onto the view layer. The "surface" part is a completely separate layer that will be positioned and scaled to match the "view" part, and composited by the system compositor rather than the app.
You can control the Z-order of the "surface" layer when the SurfaceView is first created, but it's going to be above or below all View elements. It can't go above some Views and below others because they're completely independent layers. The "surface" layer does not catch input events, so having it on top (via SurfaceView#setZOrderOnTop()) doesn't affect input focus.
For API 14+, you can use a TextureView, which behaves in a more View-friendly way.
Edit: for full details, see the much longer explanation.
Can you clarify a little bit more? In your SurfaceView do you have a background assigned? If not, you could probably also use AbsoluteView if your intention is to simply drag pieces around. If there is no background, you should be able to place the entire view above the RelativeView that you have and only have the various Buttons and such drawn on the view on top, which would be draggable and remain above everything else.
I'm working on a game that in some ways is similar to Tetris (imagine a 2D array of colored squares that sometimes move around)
I am trying to animate the individual squares so they will smoothly slide down from coordinate to the next. Since I wanted to use Android's built-in tweening feature, the animation has to apply to the whole View (rather than parts of it). This doesn't work well for me because I only want some of the colored squares to slide down, and the rest of them to stay still.
The (theoretical) solution I came up with to resolve this is to make 2 Views, layered directly on top of each other. The top view is for animating squares when they need to move, and the bottom layer is for the static squares. The animation-layer is transparent until I am ready to animate something. I then simply turn on the colored square in the animation-layer, tween it to the new location, and turn it back off when done. In the same time span, the static-layer just turns squares on and off at the right time to make the whole thing look seamless to the end user.
The proposed solution is just a theory, since I haven't been able to make it work correctly yet. Since I have been having trouble, I was wondering if this is even the best way to solve the problem? Perhaps there is a more elegant solution that I am over looking? Anyone know of a better way?
If you just want to animate a single element check out the namespace android.view.animation.Animation. You can also use Drawable shapes and draw them directly. Finally, if you want a simulation then you will have to look into threading. Basically you will create a timer to update the canvas for you based on an interval. There are some other view canvases you can use as well like the GLView canvas.