Fancy dynamic list in Android: TableLayout vs ListView

Question

There is a requirement to have not-so-trivial dynamic list, each record of which consists of several columns (texts, buttons). It should look something like:

Text11 Text12 Button1 Button2
Text21 Text22 Button1 Button2
...

At first obvious way to accomplish that seemed to be TableLayout. I was expecting to have layout/styling data specified in res/layout/*.xml and to populate it with some dataset from java code (as with ListView, for which its possible to specify TextView of item in *.xml and bind it to some array using ArrayAdapter). But after playing for a while, all I found to be possible is fully populating TableLayout programatically. Still, creating TableRow by TableRow and setting layout attributes directly in java code doesn't seem elegant enough.

So the question is: am I at the right path? Is TableLayout really best View to accomplish that? Maybe it's more appropriate to extend ListView or something else to meet such requirements?

Answer 1

Using ListView and ArrayAdapter you can do more complicated layouts than just a TextView. You could specify a LinearLayout with 2 TextViews and 2 Buttons for each row in the List.

here's a similar question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1709166/android-listview-elements-with-multiple-clickable-buttons

Answer 2

IMHO it depends on the amount of your data you need to render.

Build layout dinamically via inflate/addView is a quite simple task but is also more slow than using a custom adapter. with a custom adapter you can reuse the convertView parameter and then set the values more efficiently