Android: How do you make an android toast stay for long

Question

I have an activity in which i'm planing to use a toast message for information. The toast contains a large text, i used this, it is not working.

Toast.makeText
(getApplicationContext(), "My Text Goes Here", 20000).show();

Answer 1

That's not possible. The last parameter in the makeText method actually expects one of two constants:

Toast.LENGTH_LONG

and

Toast.LENGTH_SHORT

You cannot influence how long the toast is shown aside from choosing one of these. If you have a long text consider using a dialog like this:

AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(getApplicationContext());
builder.setTitle("Title");
builder.setMessage("Long Text...");
builder.setNeutralButton("Ok",
        new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
                dialog.dismiss();
            }
        });
AlertDialog alert = builder.create();
alert.show();

Of course you should not hardcode strings like I did in this example. Consider putting them in the string resources.

Answer 2

You can't show your Toast longer than the default time which is defined by Toast.LENGTH_LONG.

Since you want to show large message then you should use Dialog instead of Taost.

You can achieve that using Dialog as below...

AlertDialog.Builder dialogBuilder = new AlertDialog.Builder(getApplicationContext());
dialogBuilder.setTitle("Mesage");
dialogBuilder.setText("Your message...");
dialogBuilder.setPositiveButton("OK",
        new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
                dialog.dismiss();
            }
        });

AlertDialog dialog = builder.create();
dialog.show();

Answer 3

The values of LENGTH_SHORT and LENGTH_LONG are 0 and 1.They are treated as flags rather than actual durations so it is not possible to set the duration to anything other than these values.

Answer 4

Forget about the Toast and go for Dialog.

Personally I prefer to create a general method (in a separate Java object called as needed) for creating Dialogs, to avoid code duplication.

public void showAlert(int title, int message, Activity reportActivity) {
        // Create an alert dialog box
        AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(reportActivity);
        // Set alert title
        builder.setTitle(title);

        // Set the value for the positive reaction from the user
        // You can also set a listener to call when it is pressed
        builder.setPositiveButton(R.string.ok, null);

        // The message
        builder.setMessage(message);

        // Create the alert dialog and display it
        AlertDialog theAlertDialog = builder.create();
        theAlertDialog.show();
    }