Variable layout - am I doing this the best way?

[iain coghill]

I have an Activity whose layout has an EditText and search Button along the top, with the search results in a ListView underneath. All pretty simple so far. However, the search may not always produce a full result set and I want to give the user feedback when this occurs, along with options on how to proceed, if at all, with a potentially expensive operation. Those options and the appropriate status display will vary depending on the last action performed and the results it returned. I have decided to put the feedback/options in a small horizontal area between the search controls and the results list and to this end I have created a whole bunch of <ViewStub.../> elements in the main layout .xml file, one for each variation of feedback/options layout. Then in code I display only the appropriate version using .setVisibility(View.VISIBLE) and .setVisibility(View.GONE). This works but seems just a bit clumsy to me. Has anybody got a better solution? Any tricks or pitfalls I am missing?

[Mark Spritzler]

What do you mean full resultSet?

I do know that while searching when I was doing a search/ListActivity in my app, most of the tutorials had in the Adapter a way to display a row that said no results when the query returned zero results. Also they ran the search/query in AsyncTask so the search was Asynchronous they would have a progress dialog show up with a simple message. Then remove it when the query was done and fill in the ListActivity with the results.

Is this what you are hoping for?

Mark