Question

I’ve written code to perform a search and display the results below the search form in the XML file.

However, by creating TextViews dynamically, it keeps adding more TextViews so the number of TextViews increases by 5 everytime I perform a search. How could I re-use the TextViews so I can update the text to be displayed rather than creating more TextViews?

for(int i=0; i<5; i++) {

    TextView altName = new TextView(getApplicationContext());

    altName.setText("blah");
    altName.setLayoutParams(new TableRow.LayoutParams(1));
    altName.setTextAppearance(getApplicationContext(), R.style.textSize);

    TableRow altNameTr = new TableRow(getApplicationContext());
    altNameTr.addView(altName);
    table.addView(altNameTr);
}

Answer 1

What you need to do is:

1. Before search you create TextViews and add them to the table. Don’t forget to store them (ArrayList<TextView> would work fine)

2. Every time you have your search results, go through your TextViews list and update them accordingly (with setText())

So your code should like:

public class Search
{
    ArrayList<TextView> results = new ArrayList<TextView>();

    public void init(Context context)
    {
        TableRow altNameTr = new TableRow(context);
        TextView tv;

        for(int i=0; i<5; i++)
        {
            tv = new TextView(context);
            results.add(tv);
            altNameTr.addView(tv);
        }
        table.addView(altNameTr);
    }

    public void fillSearchResults()
    {
        for(int i=0; i<results.size(); i++) 
        {
            results.get(i).setText("Whatever you need to set here"); 
        }
    }
}