How do I fill a ListView (in Android) with XML or JSON data?

Question

I read a tutorial, and it uses SQLlite and "SimpleCursorAdapter" to fill the list with items. This is the code the tutorial taught me.

private void fillData() {
        // Get all of the notes from the database and create the item list
        Cursor c = mDbHelper.fetchAllNotes();
        startManagingCursor(c);

        String[] from = new String[] { NotesDbAdapter.KEY_TITLE };
        int[] to = new int[] { R.id.text1 };

        // Now create an array adapter and set it to display using our row
        SimpleCursorAdapter notes =
            new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.notes_row, c, from, to);
        setListAdapter(notes);
    }

However...what if I want to fill it with XML data? Is it the same method? Can someone give me an example (in code)? thanks.

Answer 1

The example is using a CursorAdapter because a Cursor object is returned by the NotesDbAdapter (if i remember correctly ) fetchAllNotes method. I don't know if there is a way to pass in raw XML to create a list but you can use name/value pairs in a HashMap to create a list using the SimplelistAdapter.

You can parse your xml and or json and build a hash table with it and use that to populate a list. The following example doesn't use xml, in fact it's not dynamic at all, but it does demonstrate how to assemble a list at runtime. It's taken from the onCreate method of an activity that extends ListActivity. The all uppercase values are static constant strings defined at the top of the class, and are used as the keys.

// -- container for all of our list items
List<Map<String, String>> groupData = new ArrayList<Map<String, String>>();

// -- list item hash re-used
Map<String, String> group;

// -- create record
group = new HashMap<String, String>();

group.put( KEY_LABEL, getString( R.string.option_create ) );
group.put( KEY_HELP,  getString( R.string.option_create_help ) );
group.put( KEY_ACTION, ACTION_CREATE_RECORD );

groupData.add(group);

// -- geo locate
group = new HashMap<String, String>();

group.put( KEY_LABEL, getString(R.string.option_geo_locate ) );
group.put( KEY_HELP, getString(R.string.option_geo_locate_help ) )
group.put( KEY_ACTION, ACTION_GEO_LOCATE );

groupData.add( group );

// -- take photo
group = new HashMap<String, String>();

group.put( KEY_LABEL, getString( R.string.option_take_photo ) );
group.put( KEY_HELP, getString(R.string.option_take_photo_help ) );
group.put( KEY_ACTION, ACTION_TAKE_PHOTO );

groupData.add( group );

// -- create an adapter, takes care of binding hash objects in our list to actual row views
SimpleAdapter adapter = new SimpleAdapter( this, groupData, android.R.layout.simple_list_item_2, 
                                                   new String[] { KEY_LABEL, KEY_HELP },
                                                   new int[]{ android.R.id.text1, android.R.id.text2 } );
setListAdapter( adapter );