Question

The endless adapter that I’ve used in my code, doesn’t stop expecting data even if I am out of it. Thus the throbbing symbol, which is the loading symbol here, keeps on circling expecting some data.

How do I stop it? How do I make the endless adapter know that I’m out of data?

Also, I would like to tweak the adapter so that it can use multiple lists. Is it possible? By multiple lists, I mean list embedded inside another list. If yes, is there an example or any ideas as to how to do it?

Answer 1

How do I make the endless adapter know that I’m out of data?

Quoting the documentation:

Your EndlessAdapter subclass also needs to implement cacheInBackground(). This method will be called from a background thread, and it needs to download more data that will eventually be added to the ListAdapter you used in the constructor. While the demo application simply sleeps for 10 seconds, a real application might make a Web service call or otherwise load in more data.

This method returns a boolean, which needs to be true if there is more data yet to be fetched, false otherwise.

Since this method is called on a background thread, you do not need to fork your own thread. However, at the same time, do not try to update the UI directly.

If you expected to be able to retrieve data, but failed (e.g., network error), that is fine. However, you should then return false, indicating that you have no more data.

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Also, I would like to tweak the adapter so that it can use multiple lists. Is it possible? By multiple lists, I mean list embedded inside another list.

No. Android does not support the notion of lists inside of lists. You are welcome to take a look at my MergeAdapter (if you really mean that you wish to concatenate multiple lists together) or Android’s ExpandableListView (if your lists-in-lists is really some sort of shallow tree structure).