Question

I have a custom view, the DateView(which extends a LinearLayout) which when given a date, presents it. The issue is with the sizes of the screens, I want the DateView to present the date differently on the small, normal, large and xlarge screens. The DateView extending a LinearLayout is useful because I can instantiate a DateView and addChild at any point.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Wow! Ran into this age-old question that I asked. Anyways, this is how I solved the issue.

There are two ways (that I have come to like) to address this issue

1. Create multiple layouts for multiple screen sizes. At runtime, load the layout into the DateView, which is (something like) a FrameLayout. Find the views from the layout and populate content.
2. Use the Java Delegation pattern: Create multiple layouts for multiple screen sizes. include the pattern in client XML layouts. In the client classes, load the includeded layout and pass it to a DateViewManager class which exposes content modification methods.

I’ve come to prefer the second method for it’s cleaner and simpler way of achieving the goal: use the Android resource management capabilities to provide for multiple screen types.