Display Android dialog on top of another?

Question

I have 2 alert dialogs, dialog A and dialog B. Clicking on one of dialog A's buttons will bring up dialog B. I then want to have a button that will dismiss dialog B and return to dialog A. Is there a way to do this apart from dialog B performing a showDialog(dialogA) ?

This works, but you can see the reload of dialog A, instead of just returning to an already existing dialog A. Performing a dismiss in dialog B just dismisses both of them.

A minor question, but I'd like to see if there is a way to stack them on top of one another.

Thanks

Answer 1

Using the basic dialog building blocks it is not possible to have them stack, you will need to re-show the first dialog. The reason for this is that when you press a dialog button it internally will dismiss the dialog as part of the process for calling the click handler you assigned for each button in the dialog builder API.

One way around this is to make a custom dialog layout that doesn't have the dismiss behavior, by setting up your own buttons in the layout, rather than using those created by the dialog builder methods. Then in the click handler for you own buttons simply show the second dialog without dismissing the first. http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html#CustomDialog

Answer 2

As one reply mentioned, you cannot do this with standard dialogs. But you can do it by making the first dialog be an activity that is styled to look like a dialog, and the second is actually a dialog. Just set the theme of the activity in your layout like so:

<activity android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Dialog">

See this topic on making an activity that looks like a dialog. https://stackoverflow.com/a/1979631/602661