Possible to programmatically open a Spinner in Android app?

Question

If you have a handle to a Spinner object in an Android activity, can you programmatically pop open the spinner options - thereby forcing the user to choose an option even though they did not click on the spinner themselves?

Answer 1

To open the Spinner you just need to call it's performClick() method.

Keep in mind that you may only call this method from the UI thread. If you need to open the Spinner from a separate thread you should create a Handler in the UI thread and then, from your second thread, send a runnable object that calls performClick() to the Handler.

package com.example.SpinnerDemo;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.Spinner;
import android.os.Handler;

public class SpinnerDemo extends Activity {

    private Handler h;
    private Spinner s;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        h = new Handler();

        s = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.spinner);
        ArrayAdapter adapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this,
                R.array.planets, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item);
        adapter.setDropDownViewResource(
                android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
        s.setAdapter(adapter);

        // Open the Spinner...
        s.performClick();

        // Spawn a thread that triggers the Spinner to open after 5 seconds...
        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                // DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DIRECTLY UPDATE THE UI HERE, IT WON'T WORK!
                // YOU MUST POST THE WORK TO THE UI THREAD'S HANDLER
                h.postDelayed(new Runnable() {
                    public void run() {
                        // Open the Spinner...
                        s.performClick();
                    }
                }, 5000);
            }
        }).start();
    }
}

The resources used by this example can be found here.