Question

Here’s the ListAdapter that I am trying to bind my ListView with.

ListAdapter adapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.my_item,c,new String[] {"title","body"},
new int[] { R.id.TextView_Title,R.id.TextView_Body});
setListAdapter(adapter);

This works. But I am stuck at what I guess should be very simple. What I want to do is to display the title completely while I display a sub string of the body (say, first 10/15 chars). How do I do this in this case? Can I manipulate the cursor directly in a way so that it returns a substring at the first place or do I have to do it after the cursor has returned the values (in that case, how?). Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

EDIT: OK, sorry I thought you wanted to ‘get’ the substring of the body column but you want to ‘set’ it as a substring???

Implement SimpleCursorAdapter.ViewBinder on your activity and override setViewValue().

At some point in your code you’ll need to use…

adapter.setViewBinder(this); // Put this on onCreate() perhaps

…and the code would look similar to this…

public class MyActivity extends Activity
    implements SimpleCursorAdapter.ViewBinder {

    @Override
    public boolean setViewValue(View view, Cursor cursor, int column) {
        int bodyColumn = cursor.getColumnIndex("body");
        if (column == bodyColumn) {
            String bodyString = cursor.getString(bodyColumn);
            ((TextView)view).setText(bodyString.subString(0, 10));

            return true; // Return true to show you've handled this column
        }
        return false;
    }
}