Question

In my Android app, I have an Activity with a Spinner widget. I created it with the following code in onCreate():

    this.playerPositionSpinner = (Spinner) this.findViewById(R.id.player_position_text);
    ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> positionsAdapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this, R.array.positions, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item);
    positionsAdapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
    this.playerPositionSpinner.setAdapter(positionsAdapter);

Later I want to set the selected item based on a String which I know is a valid item in the Spinner’s list? All of the Spinner.setSelection() methods take an int parameter for the position. How do I obtain the position of a String in the Spinners drop-down list?

Answer 1

(You have posted some code now! Yeah! This simplifies my example drastically.)
I recommend using Spinner#setSelection() after calling setAdapter():

playerPositionSpinner.setSelection(positionsAdapter.getPosition("Watermelon"));

Obviously you can replace "Watermelon" with something relevant for your app.