Handling Intercept touch event without extending ViewGroup

Question

I have a one RelativeLayout and this layout is having nearly 10 views in it.

I have set OnTouchListener to this Layout and doing some work in it and returning true.

this listener is working fine when I touch the layout where there are no View (mean on Empty area). If I touch on child views of this layout, this listener is not firing...

and from the documentation, I understood that we can override onInterceptTouchEvent() by extending ViewGroup (so here RelativeLayout) and handle touch events before child views consume this event...

this will do a trick, but I need to modify many xml files where I need this functionality by replacing RelativeLayout with my CustomRelativeLayout.

so my question is:

is there any way to handle touch event for RelativeLayout (ofcourse ViewGroup) before child views in RelativeLayout consumes event? I don't want to extend RelativeLayout...

Answer 1

Try to override

@Override
public boolean dispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) {
    return super.dispatchTouchEvent(ev);
}

of Activity. This method is the first that process touch events. But in this case you need to work with current coordinates of views

Answer 2

While not necessarily being ideal, this works well for smaller layouts that won't have dynamic content.

In xml, set android:clickable="false" to all descendants of the ViewGroup in the layout (including nested ViewGroups and their children). Each child that gets clicked on will then propagate the click to its parent, eventually getting to the ViewGroup's default touch handlers. Make sure to set root ViewGroup, where you want to get the click events as android:clickable="true" or viewgroup.setClickable(true)

If you add views dynamically, make sure to call view.setClickable(false); before adding it to the view hierarchy.