Question

I am trying to create a small Android App. The app will have four modes. The top part of the display will contain four buttons to switch between these modes, and this part of the display will not change. The rest of the display will change depending which button has been clicked on. It will contain a table with TextViews or images.

My questions are:

• Is it possible to create the table layout programmatically?

• How should I approach switching between modes:-

  1. Four separate Activity classes?
  2. One Activity and programmatically change the bottom part of it?
  3. Should I create one base Activity with buttons and extend it?

What would be the best option?

Answer 1

Create layout by code is not the good solution. If your table layout is simple, I think it’s not a big problem.

Here is a simple code how to create a layout by code :

 public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState){
            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
                LinearLayout layout = new LinearLayout(this);
                layout.addView(new TextView(this));
            setContentView(layout);
    }

And as you see, it looks ugly !

Hope this help 🙂

@: Edit for additional question about Relative Layout:

In RelativeLayout (and some Layout of android), there is an object LayoutParamsto determine some properties of sub-layout (TextView, Button… is called sub-layout too if you put in other Layout)

Here is an example :

RelativeLayout layout = new RelativeLayout(this);
TextView textView = new TextView(this);
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(
        RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.FILL_PARENT);
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.BELOW, textView.getId());

layout.addView(textView, params);

You should notice BELOW, it is one of many int constant such as Right_of…. You can see on Android Document about these.