Inflate and render a UI view by a downloaded xml string

Question

I was interested in downloading the xml layout for UI views from a server and inflate that as an xml string.
What I see in the doc though is:

Therefore, it is not currently possible to use LayoutInflater with an XmlPullParser over a plain XML file at runtime; it only works with an XmlPullParser returned from a compiled resource (R.something file.)

I don't really understand the highlighted part (my emphasis).
If I have some "dummy" xml file to get the XmlPullParser could I inflate my xml string?

And in general if this is impossible what alternatives are there?
I mean besides that does not require a huge learning curve like react native

Answer 1

You can't inflate view hierarchy from plain XML files, because of the unusual implementation of LayoutInflater . According to the source code , the following inflate methods won't work with a simple instance of XmlPullParser .

    View inflate( parser, ViewGroup root)
    View inflate( parser, ViewGroup root, boolean attachToRoot)

The implementation requires that the first argument parser is an instance of class XmlBlock.Parser . The class implements interface XmlResourceParser , and the interface extends three interfaces:

• XmlPullParser
• AttributeSet
• AutoCloseable

Therefore, simple XmlPullParser is not enough for the inflate methods. The APIs should be:

    View inflate( parser, ViewGroup root)
    View inflate( parser, ViewGroup root, boolean attachToRoot)