How to override onClick on Android Spinner?

Question

A normal android Spinner will pop up a list of choices when clicked. I want to override this onClick. When the user clicks the spinner during certain error states, I want to display an error message rather than pop up the list of choices. Currently, all I can do is set a OnClickListener, but its onClick method doesn't let me prevent the list of options from appearing.

Answer 1

Try setting a onTouchListener and in the onTouch method display your popup and return true to consume the event and stop it from propagating to the view (Spinner in this case).

spinner.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
   @Override
   public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
   // display your error popup here
   return true;
   }
});

This should stop the "drop down list" from appearing.

Edit: forgot to mention you could do your error state check in the onTouch method as well, so you don't completely disable the spinner.

Answer 2

Extends from Spinner and override performClick() like this:

@Override
public boolean performClick() {
   if(errorOccured) {
       // show validation message
       return true; // the event is handled by ourselves
   }
   else {
       return super.performClick(); // show spinner dialog
   }
}

See sources for more details. Hope this helps.