Suppose, I need the user to be able to input a list of strings somewhere in the settings of the app. Say, it’s a list of URLs. The strings are not supposed to have any spaces, commas or semicolons inside.
The easiest thing I thought of so far is to make a big multi-line EditText with a hint to the user “Separate strings by spaces” and each time the user presses OK, use split(” “) to extract the array of strings.
The problem with that simple solution is that sometimes strings are not long enough to fill the whole EditText width, and >1 strings appear visually in 1 line. Sometimes the URLs are too long, so “www.” remains on one line, and the rest of the address appears on the next line. It all looks messy and the user looses track where separate URLs start and end in the line.
Another easy solution: a long single-liner where all strings are separated by ; with optional spaces after. VisualStudio uses that in settings, I find it bad as well since you don’t see all the strings at once and have to move in this long line a lot (even harder with the clumsy touch screen).
A more expensive solution: a vertically scrollable list of single-line EditTexts, which are generated programmatically each time the settings screen is opened. Would also need a “+” button which creates a new EditText and a “-” button next to each of the existing EditText’s.
EDIT: Another idea: show all the strings in a plain ListView with a “+” button in the last row. When you tap “+”, it turns into an EditText with 2 buttons to the right: “OK”, “Cancel”. “OK” would save the newly added string.
If the user taps any of the items in the list, the line turns into an EditText with “OK” and “Delete” button. “OK” saves edits, “Delete” deletes the item. “OK” and “Delete” buttons better should have images instead of words.
Or, well, all strings can be shown in a ListView, and each time the user taps on an item, an additional popup is shown with EditText for editing the string and 3 buttons below: “OK”, “Cancel” and “Delete”.
Am I thinking along the right lines? Do you know any existing patterns/libraries/solutions which solve this problem efficiently on touch screens?
It would be better, to have only a single editText, where user can set values in list one by one, and can see added values in listView, There may be some provision for a button to save all entered data, onve. See following link once,
http://www.mubasheralam.com/tutorials/android/listview-transcript-mode