Set ContentView and inflater in android

Question

please can anybody tell the basic difference between the following

setContentView(R.layout.content_main);

and

View row = layoutInflater.inflate(R.layout.view, parent, false);

from the above two method we get the view , and i know the second method generally use in Adapter to inflate the view.

But My question is ---

Can we use setContentView method in place of inflator to get the views in adapters... i am confused please help me out????

Answer 1

public void setContentView (View view): Is only used for setting the Activity content to an explicit view.

public View inflate (int resource, ViewGroup root, boolean attachToRoot): Used for inflating a new view hierarchy from the specified xml resource.

You can't use setContentView(View view) in Adapter, it's exclusively available for Activity.

Answer 2

LayoutInflator class is used to instantiate layout XML file into its corresponding View objects. In other words, it takes as input an XML file and builds the View objects from it.

whereas setContentView() is an Activity method only. Each Activity is provided with a FrameLayout with id "@+id/content" (i.e. the content view). Whatever view you specify in setContentView will be the view for that Activity. Note that you can also pass an instance of a view to this method, e.g. setContentView(new WebView(this)); The version of the method that you are using will inflate the view for you behind the scenes.

For further info, consider reading:

• this
• this
• this

Answer 3

every activity is shown to the user by its relevant view
otherwise we cant see theme on the screen
so every activity needs a view to be displayed with
setContentView() is a method defined in activity class and is used to define a view for the activity and nothing more
but an inflater is a way to grab a view from xml file
after we get the view from the xml file with inflaters we can use them anywhere
for example in OnCreateOptionsMenu() we should get the view from the xml file with inflaters

Answer 4

Each Activity is provided with a FrameLayout with id "@+id/content" (i.e. the content view).setContentView is an Activity method only.Whatever view you specify in setContentView will be the view for that Activity.Fragments, on the other hand, have a lifecycle method called onCreateView which returns a view (if it has a view). The most common way to do this is to inflate a view in XML and return it in this method. In this case you need to inflate it yourself though. Fragments don't have a "setContentView" method LayoutInflater.inflate just inflates and returns a view (you can use this anywhere). You still need to set that view as the content view within an Activity.