This example shows how to use a spinner to display a list of strings that the user can choose from.
We import the classes and modules that will be needed by the application. The most relevant are the classes from the android.widget module.
from java.lang import String, Object
from java.util import List
from android.app import Activity
from android.content import Context
from android.os import Bundle
from android.view import View, ViewGroup
from android.widget import AdapterView, LinearLayout, Spinner, TextView
We also import the R object from the special app_resources module that is created by the build script. This provides constants that we use to refer to resources bundled in the application's package.
import android.R
We also import an adapter class that will let us expose lists of strings to views.
from serpentine.adapters import StringListAdapter
The SpinnerActivity class is derived from the standard Activity class and represents the application. Android will create an instance of this class when the user runs it.
class SpinnerActivity(Activity):
__interfaces__ = [AdapterView.OnItemSelectedListener]
The class implements the AdapterView.OnItemSelectedListener interface in order to respond to user interaction with the spinner.
The initialisation method simply calls the corresponding method in the base class.
def __init__(self):
Activity.__init__(self)
The onCreate method is called when the activity is created. We call the onCreate method of the base class with the Bundle object passed to this method to set up the application. To ensure that the user interface looks correct, we set the theme used to the device's default.
@args(void, [Bundle])
def onCreate(self, bundle):
Activity.onCreate(self, bundle)
self.setTheme(android.R.style.Theme_DeviceDefault)
We create a Spinner view, passing the activity as its context, and create an adapter for use with it. The adapter is initialised with a list of example strings. We pass it to the spinner in order to display the strings.
spinner = Spinner(self)
self.adapter = StringListAdapter(["Item 1", "Item 2", "Item 3"])
spinner.setAdapter(self.adapter)
We tell the spinner that the Activity instance will handle item selection. This causes the methods defined by the OnItemSelectedListener interface to be called when the user selects items shown by the spinner. We also create a TextView to show messages in the main part of the activity's window.
spinner.setOnItemSelectedListener(self)
self.textView = TextView(self)
Finally, we create a layout in which to contain the spinner and text view, which we make the main view in the activity.
layout = LinearLayout(self)
layout.setOrientation(layout.VERTICAL)
layout.addView(spinner)
layout.addView(self.textView)
self.setContentView(layout)
The next two methods are the implementation of the AdapterView.OnItemSelectedListener interface.
When an item in one of the spinners is selected, this method is called with the parent view (the spinner in this case), the view displaying the item data, the position of the item in the spinner and the item's ID. We use the position to extract data from the adapter and show it in the text view.
def onItemSelected(self, parent, view, position, id):
self.textView.setText(self.adapter.items[position] + " was selected.")
If no item is selected then we do nothing.
def onNothingSelected(self, parent):
pass
