Question

I wanted to use a TabHost inside an existing TabHost/TabActivity. So I wanted to get rid of the Activity class and just implement a viewgroup class inheriting from TabHost. However, it seems like it is not possible to use TabHost without a corresponding Activity class – the TabHost and it’s contents just won’t show up when displaying the extended class.

I used the TabHost class and added the linear layout containing the tabs and content containers with the appropriate IDs (android:id/tabs and android:id/tabcontent) from xml.

public class EmitterView : TabHost, TabHost.ITabContentFactory
{
public EmitterView(Context context) :
base(context)
{
Initialize();
}

public EmitterView(Context context, IAttributeSet attrs) :
base(context, attrs)
{
Initialize();
}

private void Initialize()
{
// construct the TAB Host

LayoutInflater inflater = (LayoutInflater)    
this.Context.GetSystemService(Context.LayoutInflaterService);
View view = inflater.Inflate(AndroidFilterEditor.Resource.Layout.EmitterTabHost, null);
this.AddView(view);

this.Setup();

// Create Tabs
TabSpec emitter = this.NewTabSpec("Emitter");
emitter.SetIndicator("Emitter", Resources.GetDrawable(AndroidFilterEditor.Resource.Drawable.ic_tab_artists));
//Intent emitterIntent = new Intent(this.Context, typeof(EmitterActivity));
emitter.SetContent(this);
this.AddTab(emitter);
this.Invalidate();
}

public View CreateTabContent(string tag)
{
EmitterContentView view = new EmitterContentView(this.Context);
return view;
}
}

The Layout definition:

<LinearLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:padding="5dp">
<FrameLayout
android:id="@android:id/tabcontent"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:padding="5dp"/>
<TabWidget
android:id="@android:id/tabs"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
</LinearLayout>

Any idea if this could be possible? This is Mono for Android btw, so the code is in C# obviously.

Answer 1

You can use ActivityGroup to host more than one activity in it and assign tabhost to each of them. Though it gets complicated and is not encouraged. I will suggest you to use Fragments instead of tabhost inside another tabhost.