How to get text from EditText?

Question

The question is quite simple. But I want to know where exactly do we make our references to the gui elements? As in which is the best place to define:

final EditText edit =  (EditText) findViewById(R.id.text_xyz);  edit.getText.tostring(); 

When I try it doing inside the default oncreate() I get null values. So for best practice, do u recommend a separate class for referring these already defined gui elements in main.xml. From here we can call various methods of these elements like gettext or settext?

Answer 1

The quickest solution to your problem I believe is that you simply are missing parentheses on your getText. Simply add () to edit.getText().toString() and that should solve it

Answer 2

Well, it depends on your needs. Very often I keep my references to widgets in activity (as a class fields) - and set them in onCreate method. I think that is a good idea
Probably the reason for your nulls is that you are trying to call findViewById() before you set contentView() in your onCreate() method - please check that.