How to create a simple custom View?

Question

I would like to create an custom View on Android. I have tried to do it as simple as possible and created an almost empty class MyView and used it in my LinearLayout but the application fails on start with "Force Close". How can I do a simple custom View? According to Building Custom Components the View gets the size 100x100 if I don't override onMeasure().

public class MyView extends View {

    public MyView(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }
}

And I use it in a LinearLayout with:

<view
    class="com.example.MyView"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_weight="0.0" />

What am I doing wrong?

---

If I use the constructor that itemon suggest and the corresponding call to the superclass. Then the "Force Close" is gone, but my LinearLayout is broken, the components after MyView isn't shown.

Here is my main.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    >
<TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_weight="0.0"
    android:background="#f00"
    android:text="Hello"
/>
<view
    class="com.example.MyView"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_weight="0.0"
/>
<TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_weight="0.0"
    android:background="#00f"
    android:text="World"
/>
</LinearLayout>

Answer 1

may be you could define another constructor method like this:

public MyView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs)

the android framework will try to build the UI with your view from the constructor above.

Answer 2

The Android Developer Guide has a section called Building Custom Components. Unfortunately, the discussion of XML attributes only covers declaring the control inside the layout file and not actually handling the values inside the class initialisation. The steps are as follows:

Declare attributes in values\attrs.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <declare-styleable name="MyCustomView">
        <attr name="android:text"/>
        <attr name="android:textColor"/>            
        <attr name="extraInformation" format="string" />
    </declare-styleable>
</resources>

Notice the use of an unqualified name in the declare-styleable tag. Non-standard android attributes like extraInformation need to have their type declared. Tags declared in the superclass will be available in subclasses without having to be redeclared.

Create constructors

Since there are two constructors that use an AttributeSet for initialisation, it is convenient to create a separate initialisation method for the constructors to call.

private void init(AttributeSet attrs){  
    TypedArray a=getContext().obtainStyledAttributes(attrs,R.styleable.MyCustomView);
    //Use a
    Log.i("test",a.getString(R.styleable.MyCustomView_android_text));
    Log.i("test",""+a.getColor(R.styleable.MyCustomView_android_textColor, Color.BLACK));
    Log.i("test",a.getString(R.styleable.MyCustomView_android_extraInformation));
    //Don't forget this
    a.recycle();
}

R.styleable.MyCustomView is an autogenerated int[] resource where each element is the ID of an attribute. Attributes are generated for each property in the XML by appending the attribute name to the element name. Attributes can then be retrieved from the TypedArray using various get functions. If the attribute is not defined in the XML, then null is returned. Except, of course, if the return type is a primitive, in which case the second argument is returned.

If you don't want to retrieve all of the attributes, it is possible to create this array manually.The ID for standard android attributes are included in android.R.attr, while attributes for this project are in R.attr.

int attrsWanted[]=new int[]{android.R.attr.text, R.attr.textColor};

Please note that you should not use anything in android.R.styleable, as per this thread it may change in the future. It is still in the documentation as being to view all these constants in the one place is useful.

Use it in a layout files such as layout\main.xml Include the namespace declaration

xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/com.mycompany.projectname"

in the top level xml element.

<com.mycompany.projectname.MyCustomView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:background="@android:color/transparent"
    android:text="Test text"
    android:textColor="#FFFFFF"
app:extraInformation="My extra information";
/> 

Reference the custom view using the fully qualified name.

Android LabelView Sample

If you want a complete example, look at the android label view sample.

LabelView.java

TypedArray a=context.obtainStyledAttributes(attrs, R.styleable.LabelView);
CharSequences=a.getString(R.styleable.LabelView_text);
attrs.xml

<declare-styleable name="LabelView">
    <attr name="text"format="string"/>
    <attr name="textColor"format="color"/>
    <attr name="textSize"format="dimension"/>
</declare-styleable>

custom_view_1.xml

<com.example.android.apis.view.LabelView
    android:background="@drawable/blue"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    app:text="Blue"app:textSize="20dp"/>

This is contained in a LinearLayout with a namespace attribute:

xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/com.example.android.apis"