Question

I try my hardest to develop a clever way to clean out piles of Blah blah = (Blah) this.findViewById(R.id.blah) that otherwise pollute the field and the onCreate() method of my little Activity, and to do so, I feel I should not use setContentView() but getViewInflate().inflate() for every View defined in XMLs.

Is Activity.setContentView() is sorta a syntax sugar and it’s virtually repeating getViewInflate().inflate() for every View on XML? I read something saying as if they were the same.

If I can get an answer by looking into the code, please tell so. I checked Activity.class, but only comments were found.

Answer 1

The setContentView on your Activity actually calls the setContentView on the Window used by the activity, which itself does a lot more than just inflating the layout.

What you could do is to map the views to the class field using reflexion. You can download a utility class on Github that does this.

It will parse all the views declared in the layout, then try to find the name corresponding to the id in your R.id class. Then it will try to find a field with the same name in the target object and set it with the corresponding view.

For example, if you have a layout like this

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent" >

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textView1"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content">
</LinearLayout>

it will automatically map it to a textView1 field in your activity.