Question

Looking at the Android tutorial on:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/fragments.html

… it seems fragments have their layouts defined programmatically. Is there a way to use the usual XML files instead?

Thank you

Answer 1

You just missed it, this is the first code snippet in the fragment documentation:

public static class ExampleFragment extends Fragment {
    @Override
    public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, ViewGroup container,
                             Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        // Inflate the layout for this fragment
        return inflater.inflate(R.layout.example_fragment, container, false);
    }
}

It uses a (supplied) LayoutInflater to inflate a layout, in this case named example_fragment.xml (inflate means parse XML and generate a layout structure out of it). So yes, certainly possible.

Basically all you have to do is return your fragment layout from onCreateView(). How you generate it inside is up to you, and since you get an inflater supplied, it’s intended to use XML too.