Android ListViews with Checkboxes

Android has a very useful way of organizing lists: the ListView. However, it doesn’t seem to work right when you include a checkbox in the list!

Actually, it turns out that it works exactly right, but only if you understand what “right” actually is.

The normal behavior of a ListView item is that you can highlight it and click it and the whole item line participates. Not so when the line includes a checkbox. Why? http://www.mail-archive.com/android-developers@googlegroups.com/msg11390.html

Which says, in brief: If a Listview contains an item that can receive focus, that item receives events instead of the listview.

It turns out that that is literally true. Set the “focusable” attribute on the CheckBox to false and the magic returns: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1121192/android-custom-listview-unable-to-click-on-items . Don’t forget to manually set the “checked” attribute when you handle the list item click!

Here’s an interesting bit of code: http://www.anddev.org/checkbox_text_list___extension_of_iconified_text_tutorial-t771.html

Author: Tim

Evil Genius specializing in OS's, special hardware and other digital esoterica with a bent for Java.