increase ListFragment inbuilt empty text view size

Question

I m using listfragment in my app. When the data fails to load I call setEmptyText with the failure message. This works fine on 4 inch phones but on 7 and 10 inch phones the size of the empty textview is very small and hard to read.

4 inch empty text view

7 inch empty text view

How can I increase the size of empty text view?

Answer 1

You can provide your own TextView to be used as the "empty text", it just needs to have android:id="@id/android:empty" and the ListFragment will use it instead of the standard one.

You could then customize the style of this TextView however you like (either statically in the xml layout):

 <TextView android:id="@id/android:empty"
           android:layout_width="match_parent"
           android:layout_height="match_parent"
           android:textSize="... />

or by calling findViewById() in onCreateView():

TextView emptyTextView = (TextView)view.findViewById(android.R.id.empty);
emptyTextView.setTextSize(...);

A (very good) alternative, as @Delblanco commented, is to call getListView().getEmptyView(). It will return either the TextView with id android.R.id.empty (if supplied in the layout), or the standard TextView that is used otherwise.