Question

I’m new to Android development and I’m trying to implement a custom view to act as a “custom menu button” for my app.

I followed the instructions at http://developer.android.com/training/custom-views/create-view.html but by the end of the implementation I get a message saying “Unfortunately customviews1 has stopped” and the app just shut’s down.

My approach is very simple and I cannot find any reference about solving this basic problem. Here’s what I’m doing:

1. create a new Android project in Eclipse named “customviews1”

2. I run the project and it shows a “Hello World” TextView on the “activity_main.xml” layout file

3. I add a new class named MyCustomView that extends “View” to the “src” folder of the project

   public class MyCustomView extends View {
       public MyCustomView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
           super(context, attrs);
       }
   }
   

4. I remove the “TextView” tag from activity_main.xml and add a “customview1” to it:

   <com.example.customviews1.MyCustomView android:id="@+id/myCustomView1" />
   

5. I run the app again and I got the message saying “Unfortunately customviews1 has stopped” and the app shuts down.

Is there any code I’m missing here?

Thanks for any clue,
Regards,
Victor Reboucas

Answer 1

if you check your LogCat output you will find that an error saying that you have to specify layout_width and layout_height in your layout.

so write:

<com.example.customviews1.MyCustomView android:id="@+id/myCustomView1" 
   android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent"/>

and it should work.