Animate visibility modes, GONE and VISIBLE

Question

To animate layout changes, you can add the following attribute to your LinearLayout

android:animateLayoutChanges="true"

and it will animate changes automatically for you.

---

For information, if android:animateLayoutChanges="true" is used, then custom animation via anim xml will not work.

Visibility change itself can be easy animated by overriding setVisibility method. Look at complete code:

public class SimpleViewAnimator extends FrameLayout
{
    private Animation inAnimation;
    private Animation outAnimation;

    public SimpleViewAnimator(Context context)
    {
        super(context);
    }

    public void setInAnimation(Animation inAnimation)
    {
        this.inAnimation = inAnimation;
    }

    public void setOutAnimation(Animation outAnimation)
    {
        this.outAnimation = outAnimation;
    }

    @Override
    public void setVisibility(int visibility)
    {
        if (getVisibility() != visibility)
        {
            if (visibility == VISIBLE)
            {
                if (inAnimation != null) startAnimation(inAnimation);
            }
            else if ((visibility == INVISIBLE) || (visibility == GONE))
            {
                if (outAnimation != null) startAnimation(outAnimation);
            }
        }

        super.setVisibility(visibility);
    }
}

This is a quite old question, still comments show, that still people have problems, so here is my solution with following additional features:

• adjust the animation (speed, type, ...)
• does not need to extend any class
• in my case, animateLayoutChanges has problems in the new CoordinatorLayout

Function - Example (I have this function in an utility class)

public static void animateViewVisibility(final View view, final int visibility)
{
    // cancel runnning animations and remove and listeners
    view.animate().cancel();
    view.animate().setListener(null);

    // animate making view visible
    if (visibility == View.VISIBLE)
    {
        view.animate().alpha(1f).start();
        view.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
    }
    // animate making view hidden (HIDDEN or INVISIBLE)
    else
    {
        view.animate().setListener(new AnimatorListenerAdapter()
        {
            @Override
            public void onAnimationEnd(Animator animation)
            {
                view.setVisibility(visibility);
            }
        }).alpha(0f).start();
    }
}

Adjust animation

After calling view.animate() you can adjust the animation to whatever you want (set duration, set interpolator and more...). You may as well hide a view by scaling it instead of adjusting it's alpha value, just replace the alpha(...) with scaleX(...) or scaleY(...) in the utility method if you want that

Like tomash said before: There's no easy way.

You might want to take a look at my answer here.
It explains how to realize a sliding (dimension changing) view.
In this case it was a left and right view: Left expanding, right disappearing.
It's might not do exactly what you need but with inventive spirit you can make it work ;)

You probably want to use an ExpandableListView, a special ListView that allows you to open and close groups.