Question

I’ve been playing around with Android lately and I’ve run into a problem building UIs. More precisely, I’m pretty sure when I was building the first layout, the layout editor in Eclipse adjusted the visible area so when I added new widgets, it stretched in height to display them.

Now I have a problem that whenever the widgets fill the area, it’s impossible for me to properly lay them out since the preview window displays only the height of a single screen, even if it’s a simple LinearLayout with a bunch of textviews to fill about 2 screen heights.

Also, I’m using the latest stable Eclipse and ADT plugin, target platform is 2.2.

EDIT

What I meant was that the editor doesn’t display the elements that don’t fit inside a single screen height and clips the stuff (see the image to see how it clips, there are actually 2 more textviews that are clipped totally) which makes impossible to build UIs that are taller that a single screen height.

Answer 1

That’s normal there is a clipping occuring. I just tested it on my eclipse and I have the same behavior than you.

If what you want to achieve is creating a layout bigger than your screen size, you should use scroll views (and insert your initial layout in it):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ScrollView
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" 
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
isScrollContainer="true" >

<LinearLayout
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/exampleView"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:gravity="center_horizontal"
    android:orientation="vertical" >
...

Once in scroll mode, the layout will auto adjust.