How can I cancel the buttons contained in a LinearLayout from listening to clicks temporarily?

Question

I have a bunch of buttons that depending on the state of the application don't make sense to listen to events. Is there a property/method on the LinearLayout or some other method that prevents its children buttons from listening to events? Of course I could go I search for a way to detach the events for each a every button but of course I want to go the easy and most handy way to do that. Also I could disable all the buttons. I've learned that disabled buttons don't listen to events in the hard way, when I tried to show a tost for a disabled button.

Answer 1

There is a way which you can extend LinearLayout and override its onInterceptTouchEvent method and return true if you want to steal touch events from its children or false if you want its children to receive touch events. Something like this

class CustomLinearLayout extends LinearLayout {
    //...

    private preventTouchOnChildren = false;

    public void setPreventTouchOnChildren(boolean value) {
        preventTouchOnChildren = value;
    }

    public boolean onInterceptTouchEvent (MotionEvent ev) {
        if (preventTouchOnChildren) 
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }

    //...
}

Answer 2

ALTERNATIVE 1

Updated answer! I have tested setting all click listeners to all view hierarchy as follows, using kotlin extension function on View class

private fun View.dissableClick() {
        setOnClickListener(null)
        if (this is ViewGroup) {
            for (v in children) {
                v.setOnClickListener(null)
            }
        }
}

So you can call root.dissableClick()

You can also try using isEnabled = false and v.isEnabled = false in place of setOnClickListener(null)

ALTERNATIVE 2 (Credit @Amin Mousavi Answer)

Also from this documentation Manage touch events in a ViewGroup. You need to create a custom view group in your case a custom LinearLayout

class InterceptLinearLayout @JvmOverloads constructor(
    context: Context, attr: AttributeSet? = null, defStyleAttr: Int = 0
) : LinearLayout(context, attr, defStyleAttr) {

    var intercept = false

    override fun onInterceptTouchEvent(ev: MotionEvent?) = when (intercept) {
        true -> true
        else -> super.onInterceptTouchEvent(ev)
    }
}

Note: If you don't provide overloads for all super constructors your app is going to crash

Change your xml from <LinearLayout ... to <package.InterceptLinearLayout ...

On your Activity grab reference to InterceptLinearLayout

root.intercept = true

Both solutions worked for me