Develop Reference

android listview with checkboxes , without list activity

Without using listactivity, in a simple activity how can I have checkbox at the left followed by the text in the right for every row of a listview. If I tap on any row , the check box should be selected.

Just get reference from xml, using:
listView=(ListView)findViewById(R.id.listView);
Set adapter on your activity
ArrayAdapter<String> adapter=new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_multiple_choice, arr);
listView.setAdapter(adapter);
setChoice Mode to single choice mode or multiple choice mode
listVIew.setChoiceMode(ListView.Choice_Mode_Mutlitple);
now you can select and deselect checkboxes in listview.

Check out this tutorial - it will give you an idea how to implement custom listview item layouts.
http://www.softwarepassion.com/android-series-custom-listview-items-and-adapters/
To make the checkbox change state when any part of the whole item is clicked, add an OnClickListener to your item's layout root element (convertView) and switch the checkbox state there.
PS Don't mind the ListActivity stuff there. It will work either way. What matters is the custom Adapter and it's getView() method that inflates custom layouts of your items.
UPD Here's a more adequate way to accomplish what you want: your items should implement Checkable and then you can use ListViews singleChoice or multipleChoice mode with it. Here's an answered question about that, although, the answer seems to miss the actual part about the checkbox. But I bet you can figure it out, what matters is the idea:
Android ListView with RadioButton/CheckBox in singleChoice mode and a custom row layout

Spinner Small Size

I have a spinner with data content, but the spinner is very small. How can i put the spinner diferrent?

I guess you're talking about the "drop down" item list (in the other case you would just have to change the size of the Spinner in the xml file).
You have differents way to set the Adapter actually, for example, when you declared your ArrayAdapter (or another Adapter), you can set a layout to put data in a View.
See Android.R.layout
For example : "simple_spinner_item" is really small so you'd rather use another one like "simple_dropdown_item_1line"
ArrayAdapter<String> spinnerArrayAdapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,
android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item,spinnerArray);
Can you show us some code if this is not what you are looking for ? I'm not sure of what you are talking (if it's the Spinner element or the list)

Problem in Activity with Spinner and ListView

My activity has a spinner and a custom ListView and they are both sourced by custom ArrayAdapters (ArrayList of custom objects). The ListView rows are custom views (just 2 TextViews).
When I include the line, spinner.setAdapter(spinnerArrayAdapter); the ListView is NOT filled with data on the screen and the spinner contains the values I want.
When I remove the line, spinner.setAdapter(spinnerArrayAdapter); the ListView is filled with the data I want and the spinner does NOT contain any values.
When I debug, I see the data in the ListView's custom ArrayAdapter variable and the spinner's custom ArrayAdapter.
I have checked my getView() implementation for the ListView's custom ArrayAdapter class.
Suggestions?
Thanks in advance!

Can you paste some code to help identify the problem. I tested with two listviews and a spinner pointing to the same adapter. It worked fine for me.

Custom spinner items not appearing as part of Spinner

I'm running into a problem: when I use a non-trivial type of Spinner item, the Spinner displays the drop-down list someplace other than on the Spinner.
(Note: most of this description is identical to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4188443/android-doesnt-honor-selection-change-with-custom-spinner-items, but the problem I'm reporting here is slightly different. I've split these up so it's clear where to direct different replies to)
My goal was to have a slightly more fancy display for each item in the spinner, and so I started by creating a layout that contains several items, one of which is the target TextView (lbl2, in this case)
I then attempt to set up the Spinner (my eventual goal is to populate the spinner programmatically, so I'm not using resources to set this up) using:
Spinner spinner = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.spinner);
ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<CharSequence>(
this, R.layout.spinner_fancy, R.id.lbl2);
adapter.add("Item #1");
adapter.add("Item #2");
adapter.add("Item #3");
spinner.setAdapter(adapter);
When I run the program it looks (mostly) good - the Spinner is, in fact, rendering the goofy-looking multi-color, vertical layout of three textviews for each item, and it's correctly substituting Item #1, Item #2, and Item #3 for lbl2. I can even click on the spinner & bring up the drop-down list of choices.
This problem is that the items aren't displayed over the spinner. Instead they're just kind of floating over the activity, a bit further down. Hopefully this picture will help clarify: Floating Spinner Elements http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/bf9f584156.png
EDIT: Thanks for the vote up - I've fixed up the image so it's now inline!

Android Spinners work in that way... The list of items is shown in "dialog mode".
You can add a title to the list using this in the XML layout (in the spinner section):
android:prompt="Select a fancy item..."

How to manage the height of android spinner items?

I have an android spinner that's populated by a list of strings using an ArrayAdapter and it operates fine, however because of the way the spinner is displayed I'm running into a display height problem with the list items.
At first glance, it would seem that the ArrayAdapter can use a single layout for displaying options which leads to the problem I'm having. When displaying the current item in the spinner (when the user is not selecting a new item from the list) the spinner pads the text so that the spinner is a reasonable size for clicking on. However, when the user taps on it and brings up the list to select a new item, the list items presented are way too small height-wise. If I use an item layout that presents the list items at a reasonable height, then the spinner itself becomes exorbitantly huge due to its own padding of the list item.
Any ideas on how I can manage the height of these two item display modes so that effectively they display with the same height value instead of the spinner height being larger than the list item display height?

I've run into this issue myself a while ago, and it turned out that I need to use different layouts for dropdown and display
I have this code:
adapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item, cGroups,
new String[] {
"name", "_id"
}, new int[] {
android.R.id.text1
});
adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);

Yes, the above answer is correct.
It took me forever to find this, because it's wrong in the sdk samples for 2.2 Android. And I had a hard time accepting that.
Here's a snippet from
samples/android-12/Spinner/src/com/android/example/spinner/SpinnerActivity.java:
this.mAdapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this, R.array.Planets,
android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
while it should have android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item there instead and simple_spinner_dropdown_item should only be used for the dropdown items. Otherwise the spinner arrow get streched and it draws dropdown selection circle to the display, too.