How to wrap lengthy text in a spinner? [duplicate]
I have two spinner and EditText controls within a table layout view on a separate row. The spinners are populated with data. My problem is the data (texts) that are populated into the spinners are too lengthy to fit the screen size. Therefore, the spinners are forced to stretch unnecessarily stretching other controls on another row.
It's a must for me to show the texts in the spinner. Hence using ellipses is not an option. If it's possible how can I wrap the lengthy text on the spinners?
Solution 1:
Step 1. TextView with wrapped text
The first thing to do is to to force simple TextView
to wrap text. Its easy:
<TextView
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:singleLine="false"
android:text="very long text that will be wrapped to next line" />
Note the singleLine
attribute here.
Step 2. Custom layout
Now we should somehow set singleLine
attribute to false
in TextView
used by Spinner
to show the item in the list.
In your code you probably have place where you create adapter to use it with Spinner
:
this.mAdapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this, R.array.Planets,
android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
The idea is to copy the android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item layout to your project. Then modify it by setting singleLine
attribute to false
in CheckedTextView
:
For this, add file to res/layout
folder named multiline_spinner_dropdown_item.xml
with next code:
<CheckedTextView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="@android:id/text1"
style="?android:attr/spinnerDropDownItemStyle"
android:singleLine="false"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="?android:attr/listPreferredItemHeight"
android:ellipsize="marquee" />
Note that this file is identical to android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item layout, except it has singleLine
set to false
now.
Step 3. Creating Adapter with custom layout
Modify your adapter creating code to:
this.mAdapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(this, R.array.Planets,
R.layout.multiline_spinner_dropdown_item);
Here is screenshot from modified SpinnerActivity
example from Android SDK: