Question

I’ve been playing around with alert dialogs. I want to show a dialog that shows particular information about a list item in listview. Just like the android’s file manager’s detail dialog.

Picture: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20856352/detailsbox.jpg

Interesting thing about this Details dialog is that it shows list items which are very similar to Preference item in a Preferences Screen. They can be clicked upon, they’re showing a very nicely laid out two-line item listitem.

I need to create a similar dialog box but I’ve no clue how to accomplish this. I’ve played around a bit. Preference XML cannot be used as alertdialog’s layout. And I’m unable to develop a layout that looks similar to the above pic. Need help / guideline how to achieve this.

Faraz Azhar

Answer 1

You probably don’t want to use a custom dialog because it will be difficult to replicate the look of the AlertDialog. An AlertDialog can display a list of items using AlertDialog.setListAdapter. You can customize the list of items to show two rows of text per item by using a custom implementation of ListAdapter. The attached screenshot was produced by the below code and xml.

public class Temp extends Activity
{
    private String[] listItemsFirstRow = {"item 1", "item 2", "item 3"};
    private String[] listItemsSecondRow = {"item 1", "item 2", "item 3"};

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
    {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(this);
        builder.setAdapter(new MyAdapter(), null);
        builder.setTitle("Title");
        builder.setPositiveButton(android.R.string.ok, new OnClickListener() {

            @Override
            public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
            }
        });

        builder.show();
    }

    class MyAdapter extends BaseAdapter
    {

        @Override
        public int getCount() 
        {
            return listItemsFirstRow.length;
        }

        @Override
        public Object getItem(int position) 
        {
            //this isn't great
            return listItemsFirstRow[position];
        }

        @Override
        public long getItemId(int position) 
        {
            return position;
        }

        @Override
        public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) 
        {
            if(convertView == null)
            {
                convertView = getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.main, null);
            }

            ((TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.text1)).setText( listItemsFirstRow[position]);
            ((TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.text2)).setText( listItemsSecondRow[position]);

            return convertView;
        }

    }
}

main.xml

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:minHeight=![enter image description here][2]"?android:attr/listPreferredItemHeight"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:gravity="center_vertical"
    android:paddingLeft="15dip"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent" >
    <TextView
        android:textAppearance="?android:attr/textAppearanceLarge"
        android:id="@+id/text1"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
    <TextView
        android:textAppearance="?android:attr/textAppearanceSmall"
        android:textColor="?android:attr/textColorSecondary" 
        android:id="@+id/text2"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
</LinearLayout>