Question

I have a rather trivial question, but I thought I’d give it a shot. I’m writing an android app and I have a viewgroup form that is loaded from a web server. While the internet access is running, I used to pop up a dialog box with a progress bar. I decided it would look less clunky if I swtiched to the nice small indeterminate progress bar in the title bar.

The title bar option does look less busy, except that the form items (textviews, buttons etc) are all enabled during the retrieval. I then used a recursive routine to disable all the views in the viewgroup, but that again looks ugly – the greyed out textviews (2.3.3) look gross, especially the one with the focus with the orange bar around it. If I pop up a progress bar, the underlying view looks nicely disabled – the window behind is simply slowly dimmed down. From a visual point of view, it much more obvious that we’re waiting for something to occur when the entire window is dimmed rather than being faced with a bunch of disabled controls.

Is there a call I can make to disable a view in a similar way the OS does when a progress bar or other window is overlapped on top? This would give me the best of both worlds.

I guess the other option is to set the view to invisible during the access, but I got curious because I can see the OS doing exactly what I want when I use the popup.

Answer 1

I figured out how to do this using a relative layout with a progress dialog wrapped in a frame layout overlapping the main view. When I do my network get, I set the visibility of the frame layout to visible with the background set to translucent, and disable the controls in the underlying view. Works pretty well.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
 <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content" >
  <ScrollView
    android:id="@+id/itemView"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" >
  </ScrollView>

  <FrameLayout
   android:id="@+id/itemProgress"
   android:layout_width="fill_parent"
   android:layout_height="fill_parent"
   android:background="#55000000"
   android:visibility="gone"
   >
   <ProgressBar
     style="?android:attr/progressBarStyleLarge"
     android:layout_height="wrap_content"
     android:layout_width="wrap_content"
     android:layout_gravity="center|center_vertical"
     android:indeterminateOnly="true"
   />
  </FrameLayout>
</RelativeLayout>