Android - Detect Path of Complex Drag

Question

I am recently getting into Android programming and want to make a simple game using 2D canvas drawing. I have checked out the Lunar Lander example and read up on some gestures, but it looks like I can only detect if a gesture occurred. I am looking to do a little more complicated detection on a swipe:

I want to make a simple game where a user can drag their finger through one or more objects on the screen and I want to be able to detect the objects that they went over in their path. They may start going vertically, then horizontally, then vertically again, such that at the end of a contiguous swipe they have selected 4 elements.

1) Are there APIs that expose the functionality of getting the full path of a swipe like this? 2) Since I am drawing on a Canvas, I don't think I will be able to access things like "onMouseOver" for the items in my game. I will have to instead detect if the swipe was within the bounding box of my sprites. Am I thinking about this correctly?

If I have overlooked an obvious post, I apologize. Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I decided to implement the public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) handler in my code for my game. Instead of getting the full path, I do a check to see which tile the user is over each time the onTouchEvent fires. I previously thought this event fired only once on the first touch, but it fires as long as you are moving along the surface of the screen, even if you haven't retouched.