How to show own view in Spinner Widget instead of Text View?

Question

I have a selection for some items using a spinner widget. At the moment the spinner will load a simple Textview and show the name of the item.
It is possible to define an own view to show inside the spinner row? I would suspect it being similar to a custom List row.

I simply want to show an individual icon left from the spinner text for each item in the list.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do that - as you may know, Spinner is a type of AdapterView, which means that you can adapt your own data to show in such View.

The approach is pretty similar to the one with ListView. Excerpt from ApiDemos:

ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,
                android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item, INTERPOLATORS);
adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
s.setAdapter(adapter);

You can define your own layout and pass it to the SpinnerAdapter subclass that you use.

Answer 2

Yes, it is very easy.

The main thing is that, define TextView as the root element in the layout file.
Do as below:

ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,
                android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item, INTERPOLATORS);
adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
s.setAdapter(adapter);

simple_spinner_dropdown_item.xml file :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<TextView>
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="50px"
    android:textColor="#000000"
    android:textSize="20px"
    android:gravity="center_vertical" >
</TextView>