Android TextView has height and width of 0

Question

I have a small project where I want to reuse a certain UI component a few time so I created a widget by expanding a ViewGroup. In that ViewGroup I inflated a view that contained a TextView inside a LinearLayout and added that inflated view to the ViewGroup trough addView.

The outer LinearLayout expands itself perfectly but the inner TextView have getHeight() = 0 and getWith() = 0 when I view it through Hierarchy Viewer. The strange thing is that layout_height and layout_width is the values I gave them in my xml.

I don't have the code here but it looked something like this:

xml:

<LinearLayout       android:layout_width="fill_parent"       android:layout_height="fill_parent">        <TextView           android:text="random text.."           android:layout_with="200px"           android:layout_height="50px" />   </LinearLayout>   

Java:

class MyWidget extends ViewGroup { ...  //In constructor   myView = View.inflate(context, R.layout.xml, null);   addView(myView);    //In layout   myView.layout(l, t, r, b);   

I have tried to give my text view fill_parent values for size but it didn't help.

Answer 1

Remember:getHeight() and getWidth()return 0 if components are not drawn yet.

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To find the width And height of a View before it being drawn:

1. First call measure

   view.measure(MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED,MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED) 

2. Now you can get width using getMeasuredWidth and height using getMeasuredHeight

   int width = view.getMeasuredWidth(); int height = view.getMeasuredHeight(); 

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I have posted some more ideas here: How to get width/height of a View

Answer 2

1) Here is some links to use Hierarchy Viewer on your dev phone.

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/debugging/debugging-ui.html

and the class you'll need:

http://github.com/romainguy/ViewServer

2) You can also reuse layout like a component with the include tag:

<include android:id="@+id/your_id" layout="@layout/layout_name" />