Question

Imagine a layout with 4 buttons

 _______________________________
|              |                |
|      A       |       B        |
|______________|________________|
|              |                |
|      C       |       D        |
|______________|________________|

I’d like to detect the fling gesture over the whole layout but when the fling starts over a button is no detected.

I’m using:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    gesturedetector= new GestureDetector(this, this);

    findViewById(R.id.touchContainer).setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {

        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            Log.e("","TouchEvent");
            return gesturedetector.onTouchEvent(event);
        }
    });
}

It when there is no clickable items but fails if the fling start over a clickable item.

How can I solve that? Offering a bounty of 50 point for a complete working answer

Answer 1

One way I have achieved this is to override the following method:

public boolean onInterceptTouchEvent(MotionEvent event){
    super.onInterceptTouchEvent(event);
    ...

You can override this method in your layout container (e.g. ViewGroup, or whatever you’re holding the buttons with) and continue to return false from it in order to ‘intercept’ touch events that are being consumed by child Views (i.e. your buttons). Within that overridden method you can then call your gesture detector object with the MotionEvents. This method also ‘sees’ events that target the ViewGroup itself as well, which means – if I remember correctly – you would only need to call your gesture detector from within that method, and in doing so the gesture detector will ‘see’ all events, no matter whether they’er over the buttons or not. So if you drag your finger starting over a button and then ending at some point on the layout background, the gesture detector should see the entire swipe. You would not need to feed the gesture detector with the events from the layout’s own onTouchEvent() because it’ll have already seen them.

A second way:

I just looked at my project where I used this, and realised that I switched to a different way of doing it. What I actually did was I designed all of my child Views such that the parent Activity (or the containing ViewGroup) could register the same gesture detector object with all of those child Views (each of my special Views have a method called registerGestureDetector()). Then, in the overridden ‘onTouchEvent()’ in my child Views, I pass the MotionEvents to the gesture detector that has been registered with that View. In other words, the parent ViewGroup layout and all the child Views simply share the same gesture detector.

I realise that this may sound like a bit of hassle and not necessary considering it could be done using onInterceptTouchEvent(), but my application deals with some pretty complicated rules regarding how my Views need to respond to touch events and gestures, and it allowed me to apply some additional logic that I needed specific for my application. However, both of these methods I’ve used achieve the same basic objective here: to channel the MotionEvents that targetted various Views to the same gesture detector object.