Develop Reference

How to make the entire screen containting a (LinearLayout + ListView) scrollable

I have an Android fragment in which contains a Vertical LinearLayout with two layouts inside it: Another inner Vertical LinearLayout (which takes at least half of the screen) and a ListView (which shows a number of smaller Views). A good way to think about it is something like a facebook post along with several comments showing below it.
The problem I am facing is that the the inner LinearLayout is not scrollable and therefore parts of the ListView stays outside of the screen and there is no way to scroll the screen up to see the entire ListView (the inner layout could possibly take up the entire screen). Placing the entire layout inside a ScrollView is also known to be a bad practice.
I know one solution is to make the entire layout to be a ListView with the first cell to be the inner LinearLayout, followed by the cells from the original ListView. That however has its own issues: It is harder to recycle the views in the ListView, and generally I also see it as a bad practice where one cell has a different behavior from all other cells in the ListView.
Is there a better solution to this? I can imagine this is a typical problem and I hope to find a better solution than above.

This may help you:
ListView yourListView = new ListView(this);
yourListView.addHeader(getHeaderView());
You can also add footer to a ListView. When you do this, the header(or footer) will become part of the ListView, and so it will be scrollable. You can find the document here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/ListView.html.

How to create a listview in android with 2 columns, each of them having items with different height?

I am quite new to android, so I apologize in advance for any inconveniences my question may provoke.
I would like to create a listview that looks exactly like this image.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42311831#N07/10145401953/
The listview would have 2 columns, each having custom views with variable height (represented on the image with rectangular shapes in different colors).
Creating this with 2 different listviews would be quite an easy job.
My approach would be creating 2 listviews and making them kind of "listen" to each-others on-scroll event, and responding to it by scrolling themselves simultaneously. That would mean, if I scroll down one of those 2 listviews, the other one would respond as if I had scrolled it down as well.
I am not sure that this is the right solution, so I would like to ask if anyone has experience with creating a component like this one?
Thank you very much for your time,
Bojan

thaats not a listview its a gridview. a gridview that could be adjusted as per the content in each grids, you can create a simple gridview with fixed size in a same way a you create a linear layout, that is
define a gridview xml
define gridview row xml (this contains textviews, edittext, buttons etc) or from your image it can have colors like red,green,blue etc
you can set number of gridview as 1 while portrait mode and 2 while landscape mode to get what your image is looking
create above xml and in your activity you can inflate it just the way listviews are inflated.
or incase you need grids with uneven sizes check this library
http://www.androidviews.net/2013/01/pinterest-like-adapterview/
i hope im clear and you appreciate my effort :)

Layout realigned by dynamic text content

i'm trying to layout a fairly basic screen. it's just a details view screen after a list item click.
initially i'm looking to acheive a side by side stacked label value type of screen.
for example, where to the left of colon is static text and to the right of colon being dynamic values based on row clicked.
first name: john
last name: doe
last login date: yesterday
additional info: blah
i've started with a relative layout with a bunch of text views in it all positioned accordingly to acheive something like what i was looking for.
The problem arises when the dynamic data being displayed grows and stretches its enclosing text view. Of course the static labels don't grow and everything gets mis aligned...
I'm wondering if there is a different way of tackling this sort of layout...
i was shying away from stacking a bunch of horizontal linear layouts inside a vertical linear layout.
is table layout the way to go? i've read that "they usually aren’t the best tool for doing so, as they are derived from LinearLayout and not the most efficient of layout controls".

Yes there is. Use a listview with a layout predefined in xml. Use a simplelistadapter and pass it the dataset that you want to populate it with.
Edit
Here is a great tutorial:
http://www.vogella.com/articles/AndroidListView/article.html

For a simple form like you want to create I'd suggest using a TableLayout. It is simple to use. As you said the alternative to a TableLayout would be horizontal LinearLayouts in a parent vertical LinearLayout. Using a TableLayout will also automatically align the right side dynamic content for you. Everything on the right side will be treated as a column so if one resizes, they all resize to match.

In your particular scenario I would believe that the TableLayout would work well (although I have also heard similar issues of efficiency/performance). As long as the entire Viewgroup of this Activity isn't complex, I don't think the performance will be too noticeable.
If you are attempting to make the RelativeLayout version work, perhaps you can try this: Have all of your static labels are aligned to the left using android:layout_alignParentLeft and have each aligned to the top of the dynamic TextView they are corresponding to using android:layout_alignTop. This should keep the static TextViews aligned to the left while aligned to the dynamic view relative to it.
Now that those views are aligned, we can horizontally align the dynamic views to the longest static TextView using android:layout_toRightOf. From there, all the remaining dynamic views can also android:layout_alignLeft to this anchor dynamic TextView, or also align to the longest static TextView in the same manner that the anchor was. This solves the horizontal alignment of all the dynamic TextViews.
Finally, we can set that each dynamic TextView falls under the next, since the dynamic TextViews are our determining our vertical location within this RelativeLayout. Each view can use android:layout_alignBelow to chain the fields to align vertically.
I believe this should work for you and I can edit this post later in the day if you would like a sample of code.

Android Layouts, Table, Relative and Linear, i am confused in their differences

I have read many articles regarding layout, but I am still quitely confused. My questions are:
When to use relative layout? Example?
When to use table layout and why we can't use it instead of relative layout?
When to use linear layout?
I just need brief answers.

When use which layout?
I think It depends on your UI, and most important thing that how you create optimized layout.
From definition : -
LinearLayout – designed to display child View controls in a single row or column. This is a very handy layout method for creating forms.
RelativeLayout – designed to display child View controls in relation to each other. For instance, you can set a control to be positioned “above” or “below” or “to the left of” or “to the right of” another control, referred to by its unique identifier. You can also align child View controls relative to the parent edges.
TableLayout – designed to organize child View controls into rows and columns. Individual View controls are added within each row of the table using a TableRow layout View (which is basically a horizontally oriented LinearLayout) for each row of the table.
References :
Creating Efficient Layouts
Common Layout Objects
And most important Hierarchy Viewer

at first there is some confusion about these layouts but as you start playing with these three layouts u will get idea where to use what.. I worked on relative-layout the most.
Consider i want to use a widget always at bottom of screen then with table or linear layout this is not possible always.. without feeling screen other two can not make item at bottom but relative can do.use of any type of layout depends on your screen requirements.

I started out using relativelayout. But recently I've switched to using mostly linearlayout.
The reason is kind of hard to explain, but take this as an example: Say I want a layout that has two images centered in the middle of the screen. Both images should take up 1/4 of the screen width and 1/4 of the screen height. This is impossible to do with relativelayout assuming you want it to work exactly the same on all devices. But you can do this with Linearlayout. By creating vertical and horizontal parents, you can create "boxes". To accomplish this you must learn about weigthsum and weigth. Parent layouts should have the weigthsum attribute and children should have the weight attribute.
Anyway, my point: Relativelayout is easy to use but it's also deceptive. You may think that your layout will look exactly alike on all device, but most likely, they won't look alike. The reason for this is:
With relativelayout you must define size with either dp or px(assuming you don't fill parent or wrap content).
Different devices have different aspect ratios.
I hoped that helped in terms of understanding relative and linearlayout.

Layout usage in Android

I am new to android.
As far as I know, there are different layouts like the liner layout, the table layout, and some others. I would like to know in which case what layout would be suitable.
I am unable to categorize the exact differences between the layouts.
Also, can someone please tell me what the specific meanings of the attributes like fill_parent, wrap_parent are?

What type of layout to use really depends on how the layout you are trying to build looks. If you have a simple layout of items one after another, a LinearLayout usually is the best choice. It's easy to work with, but the drawback is that you can't really customize the layout very much. All your views will just end up in a horizontal or vertical list. A RelativeLayout gives you a better way of adding Views that are right/left/top/bottom aligned compared to its parent view. And last but not least, the TableLayout is really great if you are building a grid of views.

All layouts have specific uses. Read android.developers.com, fill parent means your view will cover whole screen area, wrap-content covers that much area that is occupied by the layout's child views. Match - parent takes area equal to its parent area.But using match parent is not good.