Android - Activity vs. ListActivity - Which one should my activity class extend?

Question

Hello everyone,

I've been learning to develop in Android and had more of a general question: If I have a layout that uses a list and some other views, should I be using Activity or ListActivity for my activity class?

I know that ListActivity will probably make things easier to override list-specific events, but is there any other advantage to using a ListActivity over Activity? What if I wanted to change the layout in the future to a GridView? Would it be any more/less of a pain to change the class' code?

I was just curious about "best practices" in this regard and what the benefits entail, so any answer would be helpful :)

Bara

Answer 1

I'd go with Activity. Don't really see the reason to use ListActivity, unless you want to do something trivial and you know it's gonna be with the List.

Answer 2

I'd use a ListActivity since it gives you a lot of shortcut methods to make things easier and keep your code more readable.

For example, you get the onListItemClick() method which is called whenever you click a item which saves you from creating a separate listener.

If you want to change the layout of a ListActivity you still can with setContentView() method from Activity. As long as there is a ListView called @android:id/list somewhere in your View the ListActivity will still work.

If you're still not sure, you could always look at the source code for ListActivity and see that it doesn't do all that much other than make your life a little easier.