Have ArrayAdapter with list of objects to show objects containing string in a ListView

Question

I have a normal ListView:

<ListView
android:id="@android:id/list"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:dividerHeight="10dp" />

And I populate that listview with an ArrayList of Alert objects:

// Get ListView object from XML
listView = (ListView) findViewById(android.R.id.list);

// Create a new Adapter
ArrayAdapter<Alert> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<Alert>(this, android.R.layout.activity_list_item, android.R.id.text1, DataSourceHandler.getAlertsList());

// Assign adapter to ListView
listView.setAdapter(adapter);

DataSourceHandler.getAlertsList() returns to me the ArrayList of objects and in my ListView I now see two items like this:

• path.to.object@41a92a48
• path.to.object@41a92cc8

Those two Alert objects has a method called getName() which returns a String that I want to use as the displaying name for this item in the list instead of what I get above.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

As was already mentioned in the comments, the standard ArrayAdapter implementation calls toString() on every object in your list and populates the view using the resulting String. The simplest solution will be to override toString() by calling your getName() method inside it. If it doesn't suit your needs then you should create a custom adapter.

Answer 2

Yes,override toString() is the solution, example of doing that:

Example