How do I create a gallery within a custom adapter?

Question

Hi I am fairly new to Android development, although have dabbled in java before I am going round in circles with the UI design and how best to achieve it.

I would like to use the API Custom Adapter and on expansion of top level nodes (which in my case would show Dress Sizes) it would then show n number of horizonal scrollable galleries, hopefully with some overlay transparent text on each gallery showing designer name, price, colour etc. etc.

Is this type of view possible, would really appreciate some guidance on how I should move forward, links to coding examples would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

In terms of layout it sounds like you want a spinner of dress sizes. Underneath it sounds like you want a gallery(or maybe better a gridview same concepts apply if you find that more suitable) that gets updated one a dress size has been made/changed.

I'd suggest that you first write an adapter to show the gallery of dresses(Note in this example the view they return is a ImageView but this could easily be a reltaivelayout with the dress in the background and text with designer name, price, color etc being displayed on top)

Then I'd look into overriding the filterable method of the gallery adapter so that you can filter out the dress sizes that do not mach when the user selects a dress.

Then you'd write the spinner adapter for the dress sizes. Here is an example for that. From there you can set the onListItemSelected listener to say the activity. The activity can then call the filter method on your gallery adapter to update it when the user changes the dress size.

Additional hints/tips. Look into the ViewHolder pattern for your gallery adapter. Since you are dealing with images you have to be mindful of speed considerations otherwise your gallery will be very slow. Make sure to not re-inflate views if they aren't needed. While the getTag/setTag of a method will be needed for the ViewHolder pattern you can also stash additional details in the view holder. Look into lazyloading the gallery dress images. There are many examples here of lazy loading image in list views, but the same idea applies.