Getting list of all Windows in Android

Question

Is it possible to get a list of all Windows in my Android app?

If not, is it possible to get notifications on creation of a new View or a Window?

Cheers :)

For example: I would like to know if there's a visible keyboard view on the screen, or if there's an alert dialog on screen. Is that possible? Can I get the View or Window instance holding it?

Answer 1

Yes this is possible in a number of different ways. All views being displayed on the screen are added to a ViewGroup, which are usually layouts such as R.layout.main, LinearLayout, RelativeLayout, etc.

You can access the views at runtime, after the layouts have been built, using a handler such as onWindowFocusChanged:

@Override
public void onWindowFocusChanged(boolean hasFocus) {
    int count = myLayout.getChildCount();
    for(int i = 0; i < count; i++)
    {
    View v = myLayout.getChildAt(i);
    ...
    }
}

You can simply set up a thread inside onWindowFocusChanged that would notify you if a keyboard is created by constantly checking the number of children views of the current layout.