How to clear the views which are held in the ListView's RecycleBin?

Question

In Android's ListView widget, the ListView will hold the views which is got from getView method of an Adapter in a inner class RecycleBin.

How can I clear the views in the RecycleBin and force the ListView to recreate all the child views.

Answer 1

Calling invalidate() or invalidateViews() did not do the trick for me (as mentioned in the correct answer). The recycled views were still stored in the ListView. I had to dig in Android source code to find a solution. I checked many methods, including the setAdapter() method of the ListView class (Android API 15) :

@Override
public void setAdapter(ListAdapter adapter) {

    // ...
    mRecycler.clear();
    // ...

}

As you noticed, setting an adapter clears the recycler, which holds all the recycled views in a list view. You do not have to create a new adapter, setting the same adapter is enough to clear the recycled views list in the list view :

Adapter adapter = listview.getAdapter ();
// ... Modify adapter ... do anything else you need to do
// To clear the recycled views list :
listview.setAdapter ( adapter );