Android ListView Selection Problem

Question

Hi All,

I apologize for the following long question...

I have a LinearLayout which contains a ListView and some other items. As for the ListView, each on of its rows is a LinearLayout that contains 3 views - Checkbox, ImageView and TextView (from left to right - horizontal). Since I wanted the whole row to be selected when using the trackball (to be highlighted with a background color), I set the all three views inside the LinearLayout row as not focusable, and it worked.

Now I'm having 2 problems regarding this ListView. First, I want that whenever I touch a row in the ListView (with my finger), to get the same behavior as when using the trackball - means that I want the row to be selected (highlighted). What's happening right now is that when I touch the row it really becomes selected, but when I release my finger the selection is gone (much like happens in device's contact list).

Second - from a Menu, I can display a new LinearLayout instead the one that contains the ListView (different application's screen). When this happens, I still stores the object of the LinearLayout that contains the ListView, because I want to be able to re-display it later without creating it from scratch. The problem is that when I re-disaply the LinearLayout with the ListView, none of the ListView's rows are selected, even if a ceratin row was selected when the the LinearLayout with the ListView "left" the screen.

Sorry again for the long post.

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. This is he default and expected behavior. Tampering with this is strongly suggested against.
2. This follows from 1. to some extent. The selected-state is not persistent. Rather, assign an OnItemClickListener, and have it store away the id of the selected item into some variable. If you need to re-select the item when you come back, you can use setSelection()

Answer 2

This should help:

private void setListviewSelection(final ListView list, final int pos) {
    list.post(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            list.setSelection(pos);
            View v = list.getChildAt(pos);
            if (v != null) {
                v.requestFocus();
            }
        }
    });
}