Android Spinner with different layouts for "drop down state" and "closed state"?

Question

I have an Android Spinner view in my layout. I would like that spinner to show only a single text item when closed, but when the user clicks on it (i.e. opens the spinner dialog) I would like to show more extensive information for each item, including an icon and an additional description text view. As it is now the spinner shows the very same layout (icon, title + description) in both states.

If I attach an ArrayAdapter to the spinner, then I get access to something called "setDropDownViewResource" but that's not necessarily what I need, since my spinner data is fetched from a Cursor not from an Array of any kind (I have, as of now, created my own adapter, extending BaseAdapter).

Anyone who can help me?

Answer 1

You have to create a custom Adapter class for the Spinner and overwrite the two methods getView() for the normal closed view and getDropDownView() for the drop down list view. Both methods must return a View object for a single element.

Have a look at this tutorial it might help you getting started.

Answer 2

I was having problem too. Rather than overriding the class, I hava an easier way to do this.

But first you need to understand the difference between the resource id in the adapter constructor, and the other one in setDropDownViewResource(...). For example,

SimpleAdapter adapter =
    new SimpleAdapter(ab.getThemedContext(), data, R.layout.actionbar_dropdown, new String[] { "EventID", "Icon" },
        new int[] { R.id.event_id, R.id.icon });

adapter.setDropDownViewResource(R.layout.actionbar_list_item);

R.layout.actionbar_dropdown is the style for spinner, and R.layout.actionbar_list_item for every single list item.

I used SimpleAdapter here, since if I use ArrayAdapter, the xml can only be a single TextView.

R.layout.actionbar_list_item contains a TextView whose id is event_id and an ImageView whose id is icon.

R.layout.actionbar_dropdown is almost exactly the same as actionbar_list_item, but the visibility of ImageView of the latter is set to GONE.

In this way every list item has a textview and an imageview, but you will only see a textview on the spinner.