Right way to do scrollable view of custom buttons?

Question

Hi,

I've just started playing with Android in the last few days and have begun to put together a simple application. I am struggling to work out whether I'm doing things the "right" way or just making life difficult for myself.

The app displays a series of connected nodes on the screen, similar to a mind-map. I want to be able to tap the nodes in order to edit them. When the map of nodes becomes larger than the screen, I need to be able to scroll on both X and Y axes as needed to see the whole map. Image of current implementation at http://ubergeek.org.uk/images/nodetest.png.

Currently I don't have scrolling working, however I assume that I can do that by making the root view a ScrollView and sticking an AbsoluteLayout inside that (though it's deprecated, I wish to place objects at specific X/Y coordinates).

The nodes themselves are currently each a pair of roundrects (one for the outline and one for the fill) and a drawText and are being drawn in the main activity's onDraw(). In order to make these clickable buttons I believe I need to create a custom view for the button in order to use its onClick() events. I can then create a view object for each of my nodes and add them to the AbsoluteLayout view.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to do it in Android, or is this a horrible abuse of the API? :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Nope, that sounds about right. You just need to make sure that the view contained by the ScrollView has the right dimensions so the scrollbars will show up right, but I'm sure you got that covered.

It's certainly a bit non-standard, but I'm tempted to say that your approach will work right... I'd even go so far as to say that it's not a hack. Please keep us posted on how it works out, and if anything breaks!

(Btw, the SDK mentions that you should write your own layout instead of using AbsoluteLayout. Personally, I'd say use the AbsoluteLayout.)