android MultiAutoCompleteTextView - displaying custom views in it

Question

I'm implementing MultiAutoCompleteTextView with email contact suggestions. What i want to have is to display contact badges in the MultiAutoCompleteTextView content instead of strings. The Gmail Android app does it. Basically I Want what is shown in the drop down to be shown in the MultiAutoCompleteTextView (contact photo, name and email) after i typed in/selected the contact. Is it possible?

Answer 1

Google does this via using a custom ImageSpan. I just implemented this successfully for one of my apps. You should look at RecipientEditTextView.java to see how they do it. Essentially they create a drawable via Canvas and assign that drawable to a custom ImageSpan. I cannot post any code since ... well there is a ton, however you should get a good idea looking thru the source.