Get access to application layout from Android Phonegap Plugin

Question

I'm currently writing a plugin that is attempting to add a view to the current LinearLayout of my application.

Though I am struggling to get access to the linear layout from within a plugin, I can add the view fine if I do so within my main activity as so:

MyView view = new MyView(this);
root.addView(myView);

But to get the root LinearLayout in my plugin I have assumed that:

this.cordova.getActivity();

is my main activity and have been trying to cast it to the type of my main activity and call a function I added that will return the root LinearLayout object as so:

MyActivity myAct = (MyActivity)this.cordova.getActivity();

MyView view = new MyView(myAct);
myAct .GetLinearLayout().addView(view);

Though this doesn't seem to work and I receive no errors or such to help figure out why?

Anyone know how I can get access to the layout to add my view?

Answer 1

Okay so I solved this slightly differently to what I was attempting to do above.

Firstly casting the activity returned by cordova:

MyActivity myAct = (MyActivity)this.cordova.getActivity();

Does actually work and returns the instance of your main activity, so that wasn't the problem.

In the end I couldn't figure out why adding another view to the root cordova layout from the main activity worked but not when I did so in a plugin so what I did was to create my view from within the activities onCreate() then I provided an accessor to the view class back to my plugin and worked on from there.

Answer 2

The layout no longer exists after init() completes. The last thing that happens in init() is setContentView() is called with the layout. When setContentView() is called with a layout, the layout is inflated and the individual views in the layout are added to the activity.