android: own class extending activity and/or listactivity

Question

I have a couple of things which are the same in all my Activities throughout my application, eg an optionsmenu and some code which needs to run onresume, onrestart and onpause. I figured it would be a smart approach to put them in my a class MyListActivity extends ListActivity and then have all my activities extending MyListActivity.

This worked out just fine until I created an activity which didn't have a ListView. the App crashes because ListActivity expects a ListView. However, this new activity does not need a ListView, but would still need all my functions / Overrides in MyListActivity .

Right now I can think of two solutions. One: add a dummy listview to the layout with visibility = false, height & width = 0 (haven't tried this, but i guess it should work). And Two: copy/paste the contents of the MyListActivity class into a MyActivity extends Activity class. I feel very silly doing this, but I don't have any other ideas on how to solve this issue.

Any ideas on how to handle this nicer?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think you can implement all the features in an Activity subclass (eg, MyActivity ) and make the MyListActivity class a subclass of the MyActivity class.

Other approach is to make a helper class which contains all the features in static methods with an Activity object as the first argument. In this case you don't need to create MyActivity or MyListActivity classes, but you need to call methods of the helper class in every Activity subclass you want to inherit these features.