Question

I have a basic object called Employee. You can retrieve an Employee’s name and id using .getName() and .getId().

I want to use Jeff Sharkey’s SeparatedListAdapter to build a sectioned list. For the list items though, I need to use my custom Employee objects for the items instead of just lists of Strings.

In the included examples for the SeparatedListAdapter, he uses an ArrayAdapter<String> and a SimpleAdapter() for populating the list.

Is there any way to use a custom object/class, like my Employee class? The reason I’m needing to do this, is that when I click on an item in the list, I want to retrieve the actual Employee object that I used for that item and then retrieve the ID of the employee so I can display information pertaining to that Employee.

I’m a little bit confused on how to use Adapters properly. Should I make my own adapter or something?

Answer 1

You’ll need to implement your custom adapter. Ex:

class CustomAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<Employee>

and when use it on SeparatedListAdapter:

CustomAdapter workersAdapter = new CustomAdapter(this, resourceID, workersList);
SeparatedListAdapter separated = new SeparatedListAdapter(this);
...
separated.addSection("Workers", workersAdapter);

Edit:
Overrride getView Method in your CustomAdapter to create views with Employee info. Like this:

    @Override
    public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
        View view;
        if(convertView == null){
            view = convertView;
        }else
            view = mInflater.inflate(R.layout.your_row, null);

        Employee e = getItem(position);

        ((TextView)view.findViewById(R.id.textview_id)).setText(e.getId());
        //...

        return view;
    }