findViewById Android to return multiple results

Question

I am have created an android application that incorporates a relativelayout within a scrollview, and had trouble making my links within textview clickable. To work around this I am using

TextView TextView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textview2);
TextView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getinstance());

So, I am aware that findViewById() will only ever return the first instance. What can I do if I were, say, to want textView2, textView4, and textView8 all to become links. I assume a for loop here will do the trick?

Answer 1

Given your above comment that you have hundreds of TextViews, you could try the following:

Assuming a layout of like this:

<LinearLayout android:id="container" ...
   <TextView android:id="tv1" ... />
   <TextView android:id="tv2" ... />
   <TextView android:id="tv3" ... />
    ....
   <TextView android:id="tv300" ... />
</LinearLayout>

You could do the following:

LinearLayout container = (LinearLayout)findViewById(R.id.container);
int count = container.getChildCount();
for (int i=0; i<count; i++) {
    View v = container.getChildAt(i);
    if (v instanceof TextView) {
          TextView tv - (TextView)v;
          tv.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getinstance());
    }
}

Answer 2

Whenever you declare an element or create it, it is highly recommended to specify a unique id, at least if they are going to be within the same ViewGroup.

In xml:

<TextView android:id="@+id/txtId1" 
...
/>
<TextView android:id="@+id/txtId2" 
...
/>

or by calling

View.setId(int id)

In your case it would be easier to assign those in xml, do so for each of your TextViews. Once you have those, you can manually add them into an array and loop through them:

Array:

int[] viewArray = {R.id.txtId1, R.id.txtId2};

Loop:

int size = viewArray.length;
for(int i = 0; i < size; i++) {
    TextView view = (TextView) findViewById(viewArray[i]);
    if(view != null) {
        view.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getinstance());
    }
}

Make sure the above code is in the activity that is inflating you xml. For instance:

setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);//This xml should contain the TextViews mentioned above.

Otherwise, if you are inflating your own view call:

myView.findViewById(viewArray[i]);

For more info check View class documentation.