Question

This is just a simple question of semantics, but I can’t find the answer anywhere! We have BUTTON_POSITIVE, BUTTON_NEGATIVE and BUTTON_NEUTRAL in dialogs, but what exactly is the meaning of positive, negative and neutral buttons?

If I have a Yes/No alert dialog, and I want No to be the default, which is which? Or maybe the concept of a default button doesn’t apply to Android. (In Visual C++ for example on a PC, the default button is the one that is activated if you hit return.)

Answer 1

http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html#AlertDialog

Note: You can only add one of each button type to the AlertDialog. That is, you cannot have more than one “positive” button. This limits the number of possible buttons to three: positive, neutral, and negative. These names are technically irrelevant to the actual functionality of your buttons, but should help you keep track of which one does what.

You define which button has which function and name.

Example:

.setPositiveButton("Yes", new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
           public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int id) {
                MyActivity.this.finish();
           }
       })

The positive button could be set to “No” if you really wanted to. The link shows a more detailed code example.