Question

I have designed a menu that consists of a few buttons in several different LinearLayouts all placed over an animated GLSurfaceView within a FrameLayout. When the user clicks a button in the interface, I set the current layout’s visibility to GONE before making the next layout VISIBLE When the user selects a level, then game play starts and all layouts are GONE (apart from a control bar on the right of the screen, but that is not contained inside the FrameLayout)

On most phones the menu works like a charm, but I did a quick test on an Xperia Ray only to find that I couldn’t go anywhere because the buttons wouldn’t click. I have Log.d tags set up in most of my onClick Listeners, and in this case they aren’t showing in the Logcat so it doesn’t seem like the Listeners are firing at all. I also noticed that the GLSurfaceView wasn’t returning anything from it’s own TouchEventListener. Even though the functions triggered by tapping the GLSurfaceView are disabled while on the top menu, I normally still get a message in the Logcat.

I thought it could be something to do with the way I have used the FrameLayout. The documentation says it should only have one child, but another article I read on android developers demonstrated captioning images by displaying text over ImageViews inside a FrameLayout.

On a final note, I’ll also say that I’ve tested in the emulators and I found that both android v2.3 and android v4 display the same behaviour as the ray. Currently those are the only ones I am sure of, aside from android v2.2 which runs my app perfectly. I am hesitant to trust the results of testing on the emulators.

I am personally stumped seeing as there is no error message to go on, but can anybody suggest a solution?

Answer 1

I found the solution.

Turns out that I had a stray ScrollView hanging around in my layout that was both above my root layout in z-order and visible by default. Instead of toggling the visibility of this view, I was doing so for it’s child layout. Oops.

On most devices I have tested on, the stray ScrollView has not effected the functionality of my app, probably because the empty layout was allowing buttons behind it to be clicked. However it turns out that some devices, such as the Xperia Ray, are a little more strict on whether clicks can be passed down through layouts (possibly a performance decision).

The ScrollView was a required part of the layout so I couldn’t just remove it. Instead I gave the the android:visibilty attribute to the ScrollView so that it would be GONE until it is needed by the interface and it won’t block the user from clicking buttons.