Question

I have following code that works fine when my ListView is already rendered (eg. when fired by onClick events, etc.)

TextView tv = (TextView)list.getChildAt(position);  //list is my ListView
if (tv!=null) {
    tv.setPaintFlags(tv.getPaintFlags() | Paint.STRIKE_THRU_TEXT_FLAG);
}

However, sometimes I need to apply this STRIKE_THRU_TEXT_FLAG flag to some items of ListView when activity is being restored (after rotation, restart…). If I try to run this code in onCreate or onStart methods then list.getChild(position) returns null because no ListView item is visible yet (in fact screen is black at this time and actual drawing seems to be done in some later function).

Is there any easy way how to get around this? Maybe getChild function is not the best for this case…Or would you override rendering function of the ListView to make it work (seems like overkill to me)? Thanks

Answer 1

Don’t modify the view itself like that; modify the actual data object that represents that list item (for example, if your ListView is backed by an ArrayAdapter, this would be the array item for that list position). You could set a flag or property to denote that the item should be displayed differently, and then add some conditional code to your adapter’s getView() method to display the text in the proper style based on the properties of that list item’s object.

You can then let the view render itself accordingly the next time it’s shown, or trigger the redraw yourself by calling notifyDataSetChanged() on the list adapter.