Question

It looks like a kind of wrong approach, but I’d still ask.

The task is, you have a layout xml that describes a composite widget (like Button + TextView). You’d like to make it re-usable, so you build a class like MyTextViewButtonWidget – it will expose its button text accessors and it will also do the same for text view:

public class MyTextViewButtonWidget extends LinearLayout {
    ...
    void setButtonText(String text) { ... }
    String getButtonText() { ... }
    void setTextViewText(String text) { ... }
    String getTextViewText() { ... }
    ...
}

Layout definition looks like this:

<LinearLayout ..........>
   ....button and text label here...
</LinearLayout>

The question is – how would you load this layout so that its root LinearLayout would be the LinearLayout part of MyTextViewButtonWidget?

Tried defining MyTextViewButtonWidget‘s ctor like this:

{
    inflate(getContext(), R.layout.reusable_widget_layout, this);
}

But this loads reusable_widget_layout as a child to MyTextViewButtonWidget (that’s not what I need).

Generally, the problem is:

• You need to create a composite widget
• You’d like to be able to define its layout with xml markup
• You’d like it to load root’s child widgets defined in xml as its child widgets (INSTEAD OF: load the whole hierarchy from xml as a single child of your reusable widget)

Answer 1

Replace:

<LinearLayout ..........>
   ....button and text label here...
</LinearLayout>

with:

<merge ..........>
   ....button and text label here...
</merge>