Question

In my Android app, I have a tabbed Activity. In one of the tabs I have two TextViews and two EditTexts.

The first EditText is only one line, and that’s fine. However, I want the other EditText, android:id="@+id/paste_code", to take up the remaining space, but no matter what I do to it, it will only show one line. I don’t want to manually set the number of lines, since the number that would fit on the screen differs based on your device.

Here’s the relevant code. It’s nested inside all the necessary components for a tabbed Activity.

<ScrollView
    android:id="@+id/basicTab"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
    <LinearLayout
        android:orientation="vertical"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent" 
        android:layout_weight="1" >
        <TextView
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:text="Paste title"
            android:layout_weight="0" />
        <EditText
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:hint="@string/paste_title_hint"
            android:id="@+id/paste_title"
            android:lines="1"
            android:gravity="top|left"
            android:layout_weight="0" />
        <TextView
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:text="Paste text"
            android:layout_weight="0" />
        <EditText
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="fill_parent"
            android:hint="@string/paste_hint"
            android:id="@+id/paste_code"
            android:gravity="top|left"
            android:layout_weight="1" />
    </LinearLayout>
</ScrollView>

Answer 1

Since the accepted answer doesn’t address the situation fully, here’s a proper fix for people coming to this while searching:

Firstly, Romain Guy from the Android dev team addresses this well in this blog post:

http://www.curious-creature.org/2010/08/15/scrollviews-handy-trick/

Essentially, your ScrollView needs to contain the android:fillViewport="true" attribute.

If things aren’t working once you’ve done that, here are a couple of things to check:

• The layout inside the ScrollView (such as a LinearLayout) needs to have layout_height="wrap_content"
• The view(s) you want to expand should have layout_height="wrap_content"
• The view(s) you want to expand should have layout_weight="1.0" or similar

Don’t forget to set minLines="3" or similar in the view(s) you want to expand if you don’t want it/them to shrink too much.