Question

Is it possible to create a list view in android that is not fixed to a particular position and user can move the list view on a gesture some what floating listview that can be moved anywhere on the screen?I tried finding it but could not find some link.Does any one have some idea about it?

Answer 1

You can achieve this by setting an OnTouchListener on the list view and overriding it’s onTouch() method. In the onTouch() method you will have to handle the touch events like(ACTION_DOWN, ACTION_MOVE). Here is how you can handle touch event:

@Override
public boolean onTouch (View v, MotionEvent event)
{
    switch(event.getAction() & MotionEvent.ACTION_MASK)
    {
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN:
            start.set(event.getX(), event.getY());     //saving the initial x and y position
            mode = DRAG;
            break;
        case MotionEvent.ACTION_MOVE:
            if(mode == DRAG) {
                float scrollByX = event.getX() - start.x;    //computing the scroll in X
                float scrollByY = event.getY() - start.y;    //computing the scroll in Y
                v.scrollBy((int)scrollByX/20, 0);            
            }
            break;
    }   
    return false;
}

When the user places the finger down on the screen the ACTION_DOWN event is triggered and when the user drags his finger on the screen ACTION_MOVE event is triggered. Hence a drag event is a combination of ACTION_DOWN and ACTION_MOVE.
Once you have the scrollX and scrollY value the you can move the view on the screen by passing these values to the scrollBy() method of the View class.

Here in the code there are two things to notice:

• first is that I have passed 0 as the value of scrollY as it will prevent the list view to be dragged and scrolled simultaneously.
• second is that the return value is false as you want the android to handle the scrolling of the list items

Here you can find the complete code for this