customizing listview component

Question

I am trying to build a list view in android that would look like this (ignore the search-bar):

iPhone has a similar option called as section index :

iphone section index. http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRcssNycAZ6s_vITQaHXwo3A_pDbfGeQImVdPDPiGn5zCMAR4i_

I am able to get the sections within the list by using : http://bartinger.at/listview-with-sectionsseparators/

Now I want to build the index (something that is on the right of the first image) (Index is customized and may contain more than just one alphabet)

I don't want to do it the following way :

create an activity that has one listview on left and another textview(or may be anything) on the right then track the right element and update the list. eg : http://hello-android.blogspot.com/2010/11/sideindex-for-android.html

I want to customize the listview of android itself so that the list view would include such an index at the right . something like this. A class that extends ListActivity and the class some or how contains the side-bar. (I'll manage the coding for the side-bar to work). So whenever another class extends MyCustomListActivity it will have the list as well as sidebar.

My question is how do I include the side bar in my custom class that is extending the ListActivity ? Or is there a better approach to doing this ?

Answer 1

cause my index is not just one letter , in a few cases its multiple letters. – Gaurav Shah 2 days ago

Assuming that's your only reason for not wanting to use Fast Scrolling with SectionIndexer, here is some code that's designed to work for multiple letters.

Here is a screenshot of what it's supposed to look like: