Question

I’ve got a listview, and inside it, several listitems have spinners (the rest have checkboxes). The problem is, every time I call spinner.setAdapter(ArrayAdapter);, the listview stutters. If I comment out that line in getView(), the listview works great, smooth as you could ask. With that line, listview stutters every time it hits a new list.

I’ve tried a few things to help this. At first, I thought it might be the operation of pulling a string array from R.array.somestringarray, so I loaded those string arrays into another array to have them already in memory before they were needed. That didn’t work. I then assumed that it was the actual creation of the adapter, since my code at the time looked like

    ArrayAdapter<String> spinAdapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(ScoreCounter.this,android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item, forAdapter);
    holder.spin.setAdapter(spinAdapter);

So I created all the created all the ArrayAdapters beforehand and stuck them in an array so my code looked like this:

    holder.spin.setAdapter(masterSpinAdapter[position]);

That still stutters. It seems the simple act of setting an ArrayAdapter causes the listview to lag. Here’s my whole getView():

@Override
    public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent){
        if(convertView==null){
            LayoutInflater inflator = ScoreCounter.this.getLayoutInflater();
            convertView = inflator.inflate(R.layout.spinner_item , parent, false);

            ViewHolder holder = new ViewHolder();
            holder.cbox = (CheckBox)convertView.findViewById(R.id.scoreCheck);
            holder.spin = (Spinner)convertView.findViewById(R.id.scoreSpinner);
            holder.missionTitle = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.missionTitle);
            holder.missionDescription = (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.missionDescription);
            holder.checkListen = new checkListener();
            holder.itemListen = new itemListener();

            convertView.setTag(holder);
        }

        ViewHolder holder = (ViewHolder)convertView.getTag();

        if(position==1||position==2||position==5||position==6||position==13||position==15){
            holder.spin.setVisibility(0x00000004);
            holder.spin.setEnabled(false);
            holder.cbox.setVisibility(0);
            holder.cbox.setEnabled(true);

            holder.cbox.setChecked(shouldBeChecked[position]);

            holder.checkListen.setRow(position);

            holder.cbox.setOnClickListener(holder.checkListen);
        }else{
            holder.spin.setVisibility(0);
            holder.spin.setEnabled(true);
            holder.cbox.setVisibility(0x00000004);
            holder.cbox.setEnabled(false);
            holder.spin.setAdapter((ArrayAdapter)masterSpinAdapter[position]);

            holder.itemListen.setRosPos(position);

            holder.spin.setOnItemSelectedListener(holder.itemListen);
            holder.spin.setSelection(spinnerPosition[position]);
        }
        holder.missionTitle.setText(missions[position]);
        holder.missionDescription.setText(descriptions[position]);

        return convertView;
    }

I’m definitely not an expert on listviews, so I originally thought that I may have been doing too much logic in getView. However, if I simply comment out holder.spin.setAdapter(args), the listview is perfectly smooth with a bunch of useless spinners. I’ve seen spinners in listviews before. What can I do to prevent stutters while scrolling? I thought about pre-creating every spinner with adapter preset, but I don’t know how to bind a pre-made spinner object to a view ID.

I’d love some advice on this.

Answer 1

After a lot of testing, I found out that android is a lot slower to set an adapter that has a few long items than a lot of short ones. I have one spinner with the numbers -12 through 36, and it loads much faster than a spinner with a total of 30 characters in 3 items (not what I expected). I ended up just moving to buttons for the short lists with more characters per item. Unfortunate, I wish I knew why