Customizing Android ListView Items with Custom ArrayAdapter

For real-world commercial mobile applications, the default look and feel of the Android ListView is not very attractive. It only renders a simple String in every ListView row using the internal TextView control. For most applications, you want to create an interface that is more graphically rich and visually pleasing to the user. Luckily, ListView is very powerful control and with the help of custom item layouts, it can be customized to suit your needs easily. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can create custom ListView items with icons, custom header layout and how you can use custom ArrayAdapter to glue everything together. I will also show you some performance improvement tips you can use to optimize the memory usage of your ListView control.

Customizing Android ListView Items with Custom ArrayAdapter

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Overview of Android Linear Layout

LinearLayout is one of the easiest and commonly used layouts available to Android developers to arrange different views on the device screen. LinearLayout arranges its child views in a single row (horizontally) or a single column (vertically). In this tutorial, I will show you how you can use LinearLayout and how the views can be arranged inside LinearLayout.

Overview of Android Linear Layout

Handling Android ListView onItemClick Event

Android ListView control is designed to display a list of items to the user and the most common action users perform with the ListView is the item selection by just tapping any particular item in the ListView. ListView allows developers to handle user tapping by attaching the OnItemClickListener and overriding the onItemClick event. In most cases, when user click any item in the ListView, a new android activity opens that shows the details related to the selected item. To implement such scenario the knowledge of Android Intents and activity to activity communication is required. I will show you that in my future tutorials. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate you how you can handle the click events in ListView.

Handling Android ListView onItemClick Event

Binding Android ListView with Custom Objects using ArrayAdapter

In my previous tutorial Binding Android ListView with String Array using ArrayAdapter, I have shown you how you can bind the Android ListView control with an array of String objects. Although it was a very simple implementation, but it was useful for those who are just starting learning Android application development. As an Android developer, soon you will realize that showing simple Strings in the ListView is not what you exactly want in real-world  Android Apps, and you will often find yourself dealing with collections  of custom Java objects. In this tutorial, I have decided to show you how you can bind Android ListView with custom objects using ArrayAdapter.

Binding Android ListView with Custom Objects using ArrayAdapter

Binding Android ListView with String Array using ArrayAdapter

This is my first tutorial on Android, so I have decided to start with a simple example. Android ListView control is one of the most popular controls available to Android developers, and It can be used in many different forms and can be customized to suit almost every possible application requirement. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate you how you can bind a simple array of Strings with ListView. In my future tutorials, I will show you more advance scenarios and layouts that can be achieved using ListView.

Binding Android ListView with String Array using ArrayAdapter