Suppose you want to use dynamic views in your app, you can do it by creating in the code and inflating it based on the parameters. In my situation I have say 4 different types of views and I wanted to inflate it at run time based on an input. I felt it was a chore to create a separate class for each of the views. So ventured to use the merge tag instead:
So I created views like this in xml.
< merge
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
< EditText
android:text="Hello World"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:textSize="15sp"/> < /merge>
Then created a parent layout, something like this:
< LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:id="@+id/form_id"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
>
< /LinearLayout>
In the code, parent view is got from the following line
ViewGroup root = (ViewGroup)findViewById(R.id.form_id);
To add this merge view, all I had to do was
LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(this);
View v = inflater.inflate(R.layout.textedit, root, true);
Tada, textview was inflated and added to the root.
IMPORTANT: you have to use only the above inflate function to add merge layout to the parent layout. Other inflate functions will throw a runtime exception.
Also you have to pass only the layout id not the resource id, as this will also cause an exception.
