Question

I am adding Views (not Activities) to a TabActivity on demand (meaning that the activity can have zero or more tabs after onCreate is done). Over the time more tabs get added, now I need to save them in a sane way so I can restore them later on. I tried to use saveHierarchyState etc on the individual views, but they are restored without data from the editTexts etc.

So given that I have a HashMap in the activity which maps from tabkeys to views, how would you save this data and restore it?

Answer 1

Okay, I got it 🙂

First I thought I needed to set the IDs of the Views as described here — using this approach Android is able to restore the view states. But since my dynamic tabs all use views from the same layout their children all have the same IDs, so android will overwrite the data (The state is saved in a sparse array according to the view ID, so the IDs should be unique) and all views look the same. I fixed that by manually saving the state of my views and reapplying it via:

SparseArray<Parcelable> container = new SparseArray<Parcelable>();
saveHierarchyState(container);
b.putSparseParcelableArray("state", container);
restoreHierarchyState(b.getSparseParcelableArray("state"));

While this approach works I still have to find out if I can let Android do all the work by not setting IDs for the Views in the layout xml file (if that’s allowed/possible).