Android - UI Controls

Input controls are the interactive components in your app s user interface. Android provides a wide variety of controls you can use in your UI, such as buttons, text fields, seek bars, check box, zoom buttons, toggle buttons, and many more.

UI Elements

A View is an object that draws something on the screen that the user can interact with and a ViewGroup is an object that holds other View (and ViewGroup) objects in order to define the layout of the user interface.

You define your layout in an XML file which offers a human-readable structure for the layout, similar to HTML. For example, a simple vertical layout with a text view and a button looks pke this −

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
   android:layout_width="fill_parent"
   android:layout_height="fill_parent"
   android:orientation="vertical" >
   
   <TextView android:id="@+id/text"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:text="I am a TextView" />
   
   <Button android:id="@+id/button"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:text="I am a Button" />
</LinearLayout>

Android UI Controls

There are number of UI controls provided by Android that allow you to build the graphical user interface for your app.

Create UI Controls

Input controls are the interactive components in your app s user interface. Android provides a wide variety of controls you can use in your UI, such as buttons, text fields, seek bars, check box, zoom buttons, toggle buttons, and many more.

As explained in previous chapter, a view object may have a unique ID assigned to it which will identify the View uniquely within the tree. The syntax for an ID, inside an XML tag is −

android:id="@+id/text_id"

To create a UI Control/View/Widget you will have to define a view/widget in the layout file and assign it a unique ID as follows −

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
   android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
   android:layout_height="fill_parent"
   android:orientation="vertical" >
   
   <TextView android:id="@+id/text_id"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:text="I am a TextView" />
</LinearLayout>

Then finally create an instance of the Control object and capture it from the layout, use the following −

TextView myText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text_id);