Custom Widget using LinearLayout not getting onDraw()

Question

I'm creating a custom widget by extending LinearLayout:

public class MyWidget extends LinearLayout {
    private static Paint PAINT = new Paint(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG);
    static {
        PAINT.setColor(Color.RED);
    }

    public MyWidget(Context context) {
        this(context, null);
    }

    public MyWidget(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        super.onDraw(canvas);
        canvas.drawCircle(canvas.getWidth() / 2, canvas.getHeight()/2, canvas.getWidth()/2, PAINT);
        // never gets called :-(
    }

    @Override
    protected void dispatchDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        super.dispatchDraw(canvas);
        // this gets called, but with a canvas sized after the padding.
    }
}

I can add children just fine, but I'm never getting my custom onDraw() being called. dispatchDraw() gets called, but that seems to have a different canvas (the one that's within the padding. I need to draw on the whole layout area). Is there some flag that needs to get set to get onDraw() called for the layout?

Answer 1

You need to call setWillNotDraw(false) in your constructor.

Because by default a layout does not need to draw, so an optimization is to not call is draw method. By calling setWillNotDraw(false) you tell the UI toolkit that you want to draw.