Spinner VS AutoCompleteTextView

 

     We’ve all been in a situation where we needed to show a list of some sort, a list which should be triggered by a user interaction (click, tap, etc..)

A list is simple enough, probably even a spinner if we don’t want to spend that much screen real-estate on showing a list which the user clicks once and probably doesn’t need to see it after that.

A spinner can be a real bug once there are too much entries for the user to choose from, how much is too much? that’s a good question – probably it differs from user to user, and probably this will have some performance issues with areal large number of entries, you cannot scroll forever to find what you’re looking for.

A simple solutions for the problems mentioned above is an AutoCompleteTextView.

it’s a control which is basically a combination of a TextView, EditText, and a Spinner all wrapped up in a single easy to use and configurable control.

let’s see how it’s done:

 

first, in the layout file, create an AutoCompleteTextView, you can set it with a lot of attributes which makes it really easy to customize it :

<AutoCompleteTextView
    android:id="@+id/layout_search_rides_spinner_from_city"
    android:layout_width="300dp"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:textColor="@color/text_color"
    android:background="@color/titlebar_bg"
    android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"
    android:textSize="25sp"              
    android:completionThreshold="1"
    android:dropDownHeight="200dp"
    android:gravity="center"       
    android:inputType="textAutoComplete"
    android:hint="@string/layout_search_step_1_hint_from"
    android:dropDownWidth="wrap_content"
    android:completionHint="@string/layout_search__hint"
    android:layout_below="@id/layout_search_tv_header" />

special attributes:

• completionThresgold=”1” , which means that after the user types a single letter,the dropdown lists is shown, I think that the default is 3
• dropDownHeight=”200dp” , I specified it because I didn’t want it to have a quick snap before the keyboard is shown, which is not to fun to watch, even if it’s for a really short period of time
• completionHint = @string/layout_search_hint, on the bottom of the dropdown list, a small message will be shown to instruct the user what to do.

in the java side:

the only special thing I did is to show the dropdown list even when the user taps the AutoCompleteTextView , because it’s sometimes intuitive to tap a field to see what happens. this is done by calling the showDropDown() method of AutoCompleteTextView

autoCompleteTextViewFromCity.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
           
            public void onClick(View v) {
                autoCompleteTextViewFromCity.showDropDown();               
            }
        });

Here’s a quick snap of how it looks like once tapping on the autoCompleteTextView