Android - UI Layouts

The basic building block for user interface is a View object which is created from the View class and occupies a rectangular area on the screen and is responsible for drawing and event handling. View is the base class for widgets, which are used to create interactive UI components like buttons, text fields, etc.

The ViewGroup is a subclass of View and provides invisible container that hold other Views or other ViewGroups and define their layout properties.

At third level we have different layouts which are subclasses of ViewGroup class and a typical layout defines the visual structure for an Android user interface and can be created either at run time using View/ViewGroup objects or you can declare your layout using simple XML file main_layout.xml which is located in the res/layout folder of your project.

Layout params

This tutorial is more about creating your GUI based on layouts defined in XML file. A layout may contain any type of widgets such as buttons, labels, textboxes, and so on. Following is a simple example of XML file having LinearLayout −

<?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="This is a TextView" />
      
   <Button android:id="@+id/button"
      android:layout_width="wrap_content"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:text="This is a Button" />
      
   <!-- More GUI components go here  -->
   
</LinearLayout>

Once your layout has created, you can load the layout resource from your application code, in your Activity.onCreate() callback implementation as shown below −

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
   super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
   setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
}

Android Layout Types

There are number of Layouts provided by Android which you will use in almost all the Android applications to provide different view, look and feel.

Layout Attributes

Each layout has a set of attributes which define the visual properties of that layout. There are few common attributes among all the layouts and their are other attributes which are specific to that layout. Following are common attributes and will be applied to all the layouts:

Here width and height are the dimension of the layout/view which can be specified in terms of dp (Density-independent Pixels), sp ( Scale-independent Pixels), pt ( Points which is 1/72 of an inch), px( Pixels), mm ( Millimeters) and finally in (inches).

You can specify width and height with exact measurements but more often, you will use one of these constants to set the width or height −

• android:layout_width=wrap_content tells your view to size itself to the dimensions required by its content.

• android:layout_width=fill_parent tells your view to become as big as its parent view.

Gravity attribute plays important role in positioning the view object and it can take one or more (separated by '|') of the following constant values.

View Identification

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/my_button"

Following is a brief description of @ and + signs −

• The at-symbol (@) at the beginning of the string indicates that the XML parser should parse and expand the rest of the ID string and identify it as an ID resource.

• The plus-symbol (+) means that this is a new resource name that must be created and added to our resources. To create an instance of the view object and capture it from the layout, use the following −

Button myButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.my_button);