Question

I have a application that has an activity that shows message logs. The thing is the user must to be able to select some messages and then delete them as you can do when you want to remove some sms messages.

Which is the best way of doing that? Adding more details:

Here is a capture with the messages only.

Here is a capture with the selection layout.

I want to know how they do it to show the CheckBoxes. Did they use two layouts?

Answer 1

I wanna know how they do it to show the checkbox, does they use 2
layouts?

I doubt they use two layouts files. As the rows are very similar it very easy to switch from the layout that doesn’t have the CheckBox to the layout that does have the CheckBox just by changing the visiblity. A way to do it would be to have a flag in your adapter that indicates the presence of the CheckBox in the rows and update the CheckBox visibility based on that flag:

boolean checkStatus = false;

//...

public void getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
     //...
     if (checkStatus) {
          checkBox.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); //show the CheckBox for each row
     } else {
          checkBox.setVisibility(View.GONE); // hide the CheckBox for each row
     }
     //...
}

Then when it’s time to show those CheckBoxes(on a Button click, menu click etc) you just have to set the checkStatus flag to the desired value(true for CheckBoxes present, false otherwise) and call notifyDataSetChanged() on your adapter.

Of course you could use two layouts, one that contains the CheckBox and one that doesn’t have it. But, generally, you would use two layouts in a ListView when the two layouts are very(or substantial) different(which is not your case). To implement the two layouts you would have to use the methods getItemViewType and getViewTypeCount.

boolean checkStatus = false;

public int getViewTypeCount() {
     return 2; // you have two layouts
}

public int getItemViewType(int position) {
     if (checkStatus) {
          return 1;
     } else {
          return 0;
     }
}

Then in your getView method:

public void getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
     int which = getItemViewType(position)
     // make a switch statement and inflate the correct layout file
     // based on the which variable if the convertView is null
     // do stuff;
}

Of course when it’s time to show the CheckBoxes you would have to set the checkStatus flag again and call notifyDataSetChanged() on your adapter.