View.inflate vs LayoutInflater

Question

What is the main difference in using LayoutInflater and static method View.inflate()? Are there any drawbacks in using any of them or maybe they serve different purposes?

Answer 1

If looking at the source of View.inflate() we see this:

public static View inflate(Context context, int resource, ViewGroup root) {
        LayoutInflater factory = LayoutInflater.from(context);
        return factory.inflate(resource, root);
}

So, internally, the inflate() method of View class uses the LayoutInflater, which makes me assume there's no difference.

Answer 2

View.inflate() does internally call LayoutInflator.inflate(resource, root) which in turn calls LayoutInflator.inflate(resource, root, root != null). The third parameter is booleanAttachToRoot which the docs describe as:

Whether the inflated hierarchy should be attached to the root parameter? If false, root is only used to create the correct subclass of LayoutParams for the root view in the XML.

In other words, with View.inflate(), you can't tell the inflator not to attach your new view to the reference root ViewGroup.