Question

How do I create an Android spinner that open a date picker dialog?

I want a Spinner that looks like the one in the calendar app, as shown in the screenshot below.

What I’ve already tried:

I made a spinner in my layout XML and tried to set the onclick attribute to call a method that shows the dialog. When I put a method name in “on click”, I got and error that says “The following classes could not be found:
– Spinner (Change to android.widget.Spinner, Fix Build Path, Edit XML)”.

<Spinner
    android:id="@+id/spinner1"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:onClick="showDatePickerDialog" />

showDatePickerDialog is in the right class:

public void showDatePickerDialog(View v) {
    DialogFragment newFragment = new DatePickerFragment();
    newFragment.show(getFragmentManager(), "Date");
}

And this is DatePickerFragment (copied from another website):

import java.util.Calendar;

import android.app.DatePickerDialog;
import android.app.Dialog;
import android.app.DialogFragment;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.DatePicker;

public class DatePickerFragment extends DialogFragment
                        implements DatePickerDialog.OnDateSetListener {

    @Override
    public Dialog onCreateDialog(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

        // Use the current date as the default date in the picker
        final Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance();
        int year = c.get(Calendar.YEAR);
        int month = c.get(Calendar.MONTH);
        int day = c.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH);

        // Create a new instance of DatePickerDialog and return it
        return new DatePickerDialog(getActivity(), this, year, month, day);
    }

    public void onDateSet(DatePicker view, int year, int month, int day) {
        // Do something with the date chosen by the user
    }
}

SOLUTION:

I found the solution at another question.

I used a regular spinner in the layout file, then in my activity class, has this code:

dateSpinner = (Spinner)findViewById(R.id.spinner_date);

View.OnTouchListener Spinner_OnTouch = new View.OnTouchListener() {
    public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
        if (event.getAction() == MotionEvent.ACTION_UP) {
            showDatePickerDialog(v);
        }
        return true;
    }
};

View.OnKeyListener Spinner_OnKey = new View.OnKeyListener() {
    public boolean onKey(View v, int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
        if (keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_CENTER) {
            showDatePickerDialog(v);
            return true;
        }
        else {
            return false;
        }
    }
};

dateSpinner.setOnTouchListener(Spinner_OnTouch);
dateSpinner.setOnKeyListener(Spinner_OnKey);

It seems a little hacked, but it works. Does anyone know a cleaner way to do it? It would not let me setOnClickListener() or setOnItemClickListener() on the spinner.

Answer 1

I think in general what people do in this case is use a button and style it like a spinner (an approach here, I think a better approach, mostly just setting the style to android.R.attr.spinnerStyle), or they use a spinner but overload the click action to create a dialog.

Of course the hard part there is creating the custom dialog that has nice month/day/year spin-ie-things (they aren’t spinners… they are kind of like slot machines or something) in them!

There’s a few ways you can go about that, there is some google documentation here, and you can always just lift the android source code (although there are obviously drawbacks).