Android: mass enable/disable buttons

Question

I have Activity where bunch of buttons are placed inside TableLayout not unlike a dial pad. During some operations I need temporarily disable the buttons. To my unpleasant surprise doing TableLayout.setEnabled(false) has no effect on the nested buttons. Am I stuck with setting each individual button or is there a nifty (better) way to achieve the same?

Answer 1

I think you have to set each individual of this Buttons to deactivated. To make it look a little bit nicer you could put all of the buttons in a list and iterate over them during activating and deactivating. But this will not prevent you from finding them all once in you code.

Answer 2

I'd try to do something like this:

TableLayout tableLayoutInstance; // let's suppouse you have already initialized it
// blablabla
// example to deactivate all buttons
ArrayList<View> touchables = tableLayoutInstance.getTouchables();
for(View touchable : touchables){
    if( touchable instanceof Button )
        ((Button)touchable).setEnable(false);
}

Answer 3

Since the buttons are nested under a TableLayout, it should be easy to iterate over the children and set each one. I don't know if there is an easier way.