Better to inflate or instantiate controls in Android?

Question

I'm wondering if anyone can shed some insight as to the best practice for dynamically creating controls (inflate vs instantiate).

Inflate:

TextView styledText = (TextView)inflater.inflate(R.layout.styledTextView);

Instantiate:

TextView styledText = new TextView(mContext);
styledText.setTextAppearance(R.style.StyledTextStyle);

The object being created can either contain attributes in the inflated XML file, or be contained in a Style definition which is added to the instantiated object afterwards. (Assume that this styling includes width, background, text color, etc).

Haven't been able to run any time/memory tests of each method, was wondering if anyone knew which was quickest/most efficient.

Answer 1

LayoutInflator has a slight overhead because it has to parse xml in order to build the object. It also temporarily takes more memory for the same reason. Other than that, it builds the View object in the same manner that you would anyway. It may be something to worry about if you call it hundreds of times a second for some reason. 99.9% of the time though you'll never know the difference.

Also to note, any method that accepts an xml resource like "setTextAppearance" will have the same xml parsing overhead. The only difference in the examples you provided is it's not parsing the TextView xml, but it would still have to parse the style attributes.