I want to put view elements that belong together in a container (e.g. a label and input field). This is useful for example to show/hide these elements all at once. The container, however, is only to group them logically, i.e. I don't want to change the layout with the additional containers.
If I look at HTML, there you can use a div element to structure elements together. When applying a style or removing this element, then its children are affected by that as well. I am looking for something like this in Android.
Android has an abstract ViewGroup, yet I cannot use this directly. Android Studio tells me "Element ViewGroup is not allowed here". I don't want to use a LinearLayout because I don't want to change the layout. Is there a ViewGroup that does nothing, besides adding structure to the XML?
Alternative idea:
Maybe I could use the android: tag attribute for this. Such that I construct a method to "hide all elements that contain tag X". Or more generally "perform action Y of elements with tag X". With this approach I would try to emulate what classes do in CSS/HTML: Give elements attributes, query elements using these attributes, apply styles/actions on these elements. Does anyone have experience with such an approach in Android?
Bonus question: When looking at Android I get the feeling that very flexible and useful concepts, which are mature and well known from web development, have been lost. For example, in Android XML you can set one style on a view. However, using HTML/CSS you typically set a multitude of classes to elements and can create a style for each one of them. For instance elements with class "important" should be bold, with class "title" should have a larger font, thus an element with both "important_text" and "title" would be bold as well as large. How would you do this in Android?
Take a look how
<include>and<merge>layout tags are working. Probably that's could be close to that you are searching.