Question

I have 2 attributes (amongst many others) in a styleable in attrs.xml.

Given these two:

 <attr name="enableScrolling" format="boolean"/>
 <attr name="showPadlock" format="boolean"/>

Is there any way to make them mutually exclusive? The design is for a generic scale to display alongside a graph. The specific use case for an instance of the generic scale is that if scrolling is enabled, the scale displays a padlock icon which toggles between locked and unlocked and disables/enables the scrolling at runtime.

Showing the padlock is not meaningful if enableScrolling is false. I deal with this in code but it would be much cleaner if I could somehow convey the semantics in XML.

I’m guessing that the answer is no since there is no UX paradigm in the IDE to deal with it but I welcome any thoughts.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You have 3 ways:

• just ignore showPadlock if it has no sense
• check attributes in code. Show warning message or throw an exception if you notice invalid combination.

• create enum attr. For instance:

  <attr name=”scrollType”>

  <enum name=”simpleScroll” value=”1″ />

  <enum name=”scrollWithPadlock” value=”2″ />

  <enum name=”none” value=”3″ />

  </attr>