Android Programming Tutorials

TUTORIAL 5

Making Our List Be Fancy

In this tutorial, we will update the layout of our ListView rows, so they show

both the name and address of the restaurant, plus an icon indicating the

type. Along the way, we will need to create our own custom ListAdapter to

handle our row views and a RestaurantHolder to populate a row from a

restaurant.

Regarding the notion of adapters and ListAdapter, to quote from The Busy

Coder's Guide to Android Development:

In the abstract, adapters provide a common interface to

multiple disparate APIs. More specifically, in Android's case,

adapters provide a common interface to the data model

behind a selection-style widget, such as a listbox...Android's

adapters are responsible for providing the roster of data for a

selection widget plus converting individual elements of data

into specific views to be displayed inside the selection widget.

Step-By-Step Instructions..........................................................................

First, you need to have completed the previous tutorial. If you are

beginning the tutorials here, or if you wish to not use your existing work,

you can download a ZIP file with all of the tutorial results, and you can copy

the 04-ListView edition of LunchList to use as a starting point.

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