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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T09:43:10+00:00

I assumed that each layout’s element id’s such as buttons, textviews, edittexts, etc. were

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I assumed that each layout’s element id’s such as buttons, textviews, edittexts, etc. were unique and private to that layout. This being said, you set the Activity to use a certain layout, you should only be able to find view id’s based on the id’s set in that specific layout.

However, I am finding now that I can reference whatever view id I want from my Activity regardless of the physical layout I have specified with “setContentView(R.layout.THELAYOUTIWANTTOTARGET)”. Is this behavior normal, I figured only id’s of those elements on the layout I specified above would be available? Looking at R.java, I believe all the id’s I specified on all layouts are made public variables, thus, no id’s can have the same name or unexpected behavior may occur!

The implications for this on my project is that I must now change all id’s in all layouts to be unique. I figured my supplier layout > title textview would have been different from my customer layout > title textview, is this not the case?

Thank you for clarifying!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your assumption is correct. IDS are global, and for large projects it’s sometimes a pain, leading to very long ID names. But that can also be used as an advantage, as you can reuse layouts on different activities.

    For example, you can have a layout for a specific part of your activity (a custom buttons bar for example) that you may want to add to several activities. In this case, you can just inflate it into a specific ViewGroup of the first activity, and also in another ViewGroup in another activity. The methods to access specific buttons based on their ids can then be reused in both activities.

    The method findViewById will only work on the activity you call it from. If a button (or any other component) exists on different activities, only the one in your current activity will be returned.

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