Question

I have a graph view (custom view) in Android and a main view. Depending on the user’s preference I want to add 1-5 graph views onto my main view but am not quite sure how to. (I’m using purely Java and not xml). I was reading that I might have to use a Relative Layout or something in order to stack views.

Any advice or suggestions are welcome

Answer 1

in your activity you probably have something like this towards the begining of your onCreate() method:

setContentView(R.layout.main);

inside your main.xml file you probably have an element that is some kind of layout. I will assume LinearLayout for now, but it works similarly with all types. You’ll need to get a reference to this layout and to do that it must have an id. So if that layout does not have something like this in it you need to add it:

android:id="@+id/myMainLayout"

Then back in your java sometime after you’ve called setContentView() you can find the reference to your layout with something like this:

LinearLayout myLayout = (LinearLayout)findViewById(R.id.myMainLayout);

Once you have a reference to your layout you can add your graph views to it with something like this:

myLayout.addView(graph1);
myLayout.addView(graph2);
//etc...

If you want to skip the xml layout all together you are allowed to make your layout in java. To do that it would like this:

LinearLayout myLayout = new LinearLayout(YourActivity.this);
myLayout.addView(graph1);
myLayout.addView(graph2);
setContentView(myLayout);

Note that you can only call setContentView() once so you’ll need to pass some kind of Layout to it if you want to add more than 1 View.

Edit:

I have never specifically tried but I would think you could call addView() from the constructor in your custom view:

public CustomView() {
    this.addView(anotherView);
}

do you have a custom view for your layout too?