Question

I want to write a small Android app with a GUI that should display an image on the top of the (portrait) screen, directly below a TextView that might contain some info text (or simply is blank/empty), and at the bottom of the screen a button. So in between the (empty) Textview (below the image on top) and the button should be “maximum” empty space, depending on the screen size of the devive.

So, in other words: the group of image and TextView should float on top of the screen, the bottom should float on the bottom of the screen, with a dynamic amount of empty space in between.

So I ended up with this layout XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:orientation="vertical" >

    <ImageView
        android:id="@+id/curr_image"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|top"
        android:layout_margin="6dip" />

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/image_info_text"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

</LinearLayout>

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_gravity="bottom"
    android:orientation="vertical" >

    <Button
        android:id="@+id/button"
        android:text="@string/rate_button_text"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="60dip"
        android:layout_gravity="center_horizontal|bottom"
        android:layout_margin="6dip" />

</LinearLayout>

</LinearLayout>

However, with this layout everything floats on the top of the screen, the button is not rendered to the bottom of the screen, as described above.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?
Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Try changing the layout you want on the bottom to this:

<LinearLayout 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_alignParentBottom="true"
    android:orientation="vertical" >

also note that you only need this:

xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

In the very first item of the xml file. You should remove it from all of your layouts except for the first one in the file.