Question

Application developed in Android 2.3.3

I am developing a calculator application.

Question 1 :::
I have around 16 buttons. Is there a way where in I can set the width and height of all the buttons using a loop (or) without it. I want all the buttons to be uniform.

Question 2 :::
What do you think of this practice? Good or Bad? Please explain why?
Let’s say I have 4 buttons in each row. If I get the width and height of the screen programmatically and then divide (width/4) and add the margin for each button and then set the width (width/4 + margin) of the buttons respectively, will that somehow solve the problem of displaying in screens with different sizes?

Answer 1

Best way to equally provide the width or height of views according to device width and height, is to use weight property, lets take an example, we have a linear layout, with four buttons, of equal width:

<LinearLayout android:layout_width="fill_parent"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"
         android:orientation="horizontal">
     <Button android:layout_width="0dip"
         android:layout_weight="1"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"
         android:text="button1"/>
     <Button android:layout_width="0dip"
         android:layout_weight="1"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"
         android:text="button2"/>
     <Button android:layout_width="0dip"
         android:layout_weight="1"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"
         android:text="button3"/>
     <Button android:layout_width="0dip"
         android:layout_weight="1"
         android:layout_height="wrap_content"
         android:text="button4"/>
</LinearLayout>

However, if you still want to provide layout width and height at runtime, you can use setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(100, 100)); method.