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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-02T05:08:14+00:00

I’ve got what I thought was a simple android UI design problem but I’ve

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I’ve got what I thought was a simple android UI design problem but I’ve been going around in circles for a couple of days. I have a REST service that I’m downloading XML from and displaying the XML in a form in an android app. I have a web page built and am mimicking this with android, same options, same URLs being sent to the REST service whether from android or the web pages. With HTML I can easily create checkbox groups and radiobutton/dropdowns for various id/display items, so for instance, I can display a planet option as:

<select name="planet"><option value="0">Mercury</option></select>

I wanted to do something similar in android where I had a pair of values, one an id and the other the user-friendly text to display. So I decided to create an adapter using android.util.Pair:

  public class PairView extends Pair<String, String> {
    public PairView(String first, String second) {
      super(first, second);
    }

    public String toString() {
      return second;
    }
  }

  public class PairAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<PairView> {
  }

So now I can put my id in pair.first and what to display to the user in pair.second.

My problem comes in that some of these options will be single-selects and some will be multi-selects. In html, that’s not an issue, just use a checkbox group for multi, and radio buttons/dropdowns for single selects. In android however, it seems it’s not so straight forward. I tried using Spinners for the adapters, but Spinner seems to only allow single selection. AlertDialog.Builder allows for single and multi-selections, but curiously I don’t see an option for using an adapter for the multi-selection, just for single selections.

I guess what I really want is a consistent look for all my options, with radio buttons displayed for single selections and checkboxes displayed for multi selections, via an adapter so I can get the id’s from the Pair for the items selected.

What approach should I use? A custom spinner with code added for multi-selections? AlertDialog.Builder and somehow make it use an adapter for multi-selections? Just create a plain Alert and wrap a ListView in it? Another option that is (hopefully) simpler?

I feel like I’m missing something very basic here.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I had a similar situation in an app I was making so would share what I opted for. I had different type of questions and depending on that I removed and added things in my activity. For radio buttons I used with elements in it. For multiple choice questions I wanted a checkbox based view so I added an empty within my layout and in code added CheckBox(s) to it.

    As for the caption and value, for radio buttons and checkboxes you can set display text by setText and add any object/value as a tag. So what I used to do was something like this:

    CheckBox option = new CheckBox(MyActivity.this);
option.setText("Option 1");
option.setTag(10);

    Later on when you get the selected option, you can simply get its tag and use its value.

    This is just one way of doing it which I found simple. Hope this helps

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