How do ListActivities work with ListViews in Android?

Question

As a C# developer I'm trying to get familiar with Java and more specifically, the Android framework.

I've created some very basic intro Activities, but I'm now trying trying to get a ListView up and running with 'databinding'. I found this sample code: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/layout/listview.html

I don't think I've fully grasped the concept of these views yet, because initially I figured that the ListActivity class that I created would be built as some sort of a user-control that I could simply replace my ListView with. When I look at the code though, it appears as though it's somehow trying to hook into an existing view which confuses me. (How do I call this ListActivity from my current activity, and how do I use it with my ListView?).

getListView().setEmptyView(progressBar);

Could someone please clarify what's going on? Perhaps I've become too .NET paradigm orientated and I'm not understanding the picture properly.

Answer 1

A ListActivity is an activity that assumes that you will set a layout with a list view in it with a certain id. It will then store that view in a variable so getListVew() will return it. Basically its a tiny bit of syntactic sugar to do what you can do yourself with 3 lines of code.

Really I don't think its worth using. You can use listviews in a regular activity, it takes 1-3 lines of code to do everything the ListActivity does, and you don't have problems if you name your listview with a different id or if you even decide to not have a listview down the road.