Android: How to get the ID of a parent View?

Question

View.getRoot() returns View , so we can easily figure out which is the root view by using getResourceName(View.getId()) .

View.getParent() ..., while I expect it also returns View that is the parent, actually only returns an instance of ViewParent that seems to have very very few useful method/fields. It sucks.

So, is there any way to know the ID of the parent? I believe a View 's parent is also View , thus it should has mID field.

I really wonder why Google didn't let View.getParent() just returns View . It makes sense, only when something else other than View could be the parent, and as far as I know, it's limited to View and its subclasses.

Answer 1

ViewParent is just an interface that any View that can have children implements. Most of the times the class you get back will be an instance of a ViewGroup , like LinearLayout or RelativeLayout . I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "name" but if you want to get the class name you can do so like always: view.getParent().getClass().getName() .

Answer 2

The docs state that the parent is not necessarily a View :

public final ViewParent getParent ()

Added in API level 1 Gets the parent of this view. Note that the parent is a ViewParent and not necessarily a View.

Returns Parent of this view.

However all implementations of ViewParent inherit from View . This should be a design decision to decouple the parent from a View using the ViewParent interface, although all implementations in the SDK are views.

Answer 3

Try casting it first. For example, if the parent of the View that you're trying to get id of is a TableRow, then do

((TableRow)View.getParent()).getID()