Android - fancy ListView background problem

Question

I have a ListView backed by customized ArrayAdapter where each item has 2 LinearLayouts - one I call head, and the other one - body. The body is hidden (gone) until user clicks on the row at which time it slides out. The second click (on the head) will hide the body. However if user clicks on the body it brings another activity. All of this works just fine, here comes the problem:

When user presses on body I want a visual indication of the action just the same way as regular list item will flicker an orange background when pressed. I'm not getting this by default since (my theory) the onPress event is intercepted by body's view and not processed by the list item.

The first thing I tried was to execute body.setBackground('#ff00ff') (never mind the color) in onPress event. That didn't work since (I suspect) there's no repainting after the call. Then I dig a little bit more and decided to use <selector/>-based background. I defined body_background.xml in drawable folder and assigned that to the body's background property.

There I noticed that background will only change if the even is processed by the list. For example if I set <item android:state_selected="true" android:drawable="@drawable/selected"/> then when I press on the head - the background of both elements (head and body) will change, however when I press on body - nothing.

So to summarize my question - how do I change background of the child element in the list item if I assign custom onClick handler to it? Any hints will be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

OK. Here's some more info I dig along the way.

1. I'm currently trying to switch implementation to ExpandableListView which provides the functionality I had to coded in (sliding body). The problem I may have here is that I have a fancy "endless" list implementation and I'm using ArrayAdapter#add method to dynamically add items to the list while scrolling (see my tutorial on androidguys.com) Well, the add method is missing from the BaseExpandableListAdapter so I need to see if adding items to internal array will work (it didn't for ArrayAdapter) possibly doing ExpandableListView#notifyChanged() will take care of that
2. The fact that I don't see anything when I'm directly using setBackgroundColor method is probably due to the subsequent call to startActivity call that halts all painting until new Activity is displayed

P.S. this has been resolved by switching to ExpandableListView. And may I add - it's beautiful! No need to invent anything