Question

I’m new to Android.

I am drawing bitmaps, lines and shapes onto a Canvas inside the OnDraw(Canvas canvas) method of my view. I am looking for help on how to implement smooth scrolling in response to a drag by the user. I have searched but not found any tutorials to help me with this.

The reference for Canvas seems to say that if a Canvas is constructed from a Bitmap (called bmpBuffer, say) then anything drawn on the Canvas is also drawn on bmpBuffer. Would it be possible to use bmpBuffer to implement a scroll … perhaps copy it back to the Canvas shifted by a few pixels at a time? But if I use Canvas.drawBitmap to draw bmpBuffer back to Canvas shifted by a few pixels, won’t bmpBuffer be corrupted? Perhaps, therefore, I should copy bmpBuffer to bmpBuffer2 then draw bmpBuffer2 back to the Canvas.

A more straightforward approach would be to draw the lines, shapes, etc. straight into a buffer Bitmap then draw that buffer (with a shift) onto the Canvas but so far as I can see the various methods: drawLine(), drawShape() and so on are not available for drawing to a Bitmap … only to a Canvas.

Could I have 2 Canvases? One of which would be constructed from the buffer bitmap and used simply for plotting the lines, shapes, etc. and then the buffer bitmap would be drawn onto the other Canvas for display in the View?

I should welcome any advice!

Answers to similar questions here (and on other websites) refer to “blitting”. I understand the concept but can’t find anything about “blit” or “bitblt” in the Android documentation. Are Canvas.drawBitmap and Bitmap.Copy Android’s equivalents?

Answer 1

I had this problem too,

I did the drawing like this:

Canvas BigCanvas = new Canvas();
Bitmap BigBitmap = new Bitmap(width,height);

int ScrollPosX , ScrollPosY  // (calculate these with the onScrollEvent handler)

void onCreate()
{
   BigCanvas.SetBitmap(BigBitmap);
}

onDraw(Canvas TargetCanvas)
{
   // do drawing stuff
   // ie.  BigCanvas.Draw.... line/bitmap/anything

   //draw to the screen with the scrolloffset

   //drawBitmap (Bitmap bitmap, Rect src, Rect dst, Paint paint)
   TargetCanvas.DrawBitmap(BigBitmap(new Rect(ScrollPosX,ScrollPosY,ScrollPosX + BigBitmap.getWidth(),ScrollPosY + BigBitmap.getHeight(),new Rect(0,0,ScreenWidth,ScreenHeight),null);
}

for smooth scrolling you’d need to make some sort of method that takes a few points after scrolling (i.e the first scroll point and the 10th) , subtract those and scroll by that number in a for each loop that makes it gradually slower ( ScrollAmount – turns – Friction ).

I Hope this gives some more insight.