Preventing/catching “IllegalArgumentException: parameter must be a descendant of this view” error

Question

I have a ListView with some focusable components inside (mostly EditTexts). Yeah, I know this isn\'t exactly recommended, but in general, almost everything is w

Answer 1

If none of the solutions suggested here apply to you...

I've experienced a similar error and noticed it was reported by my users' devices (after a crash) without any clear explanation on what was causing it (same as the log shown on the question) - more specifically the issue only happened on Samsung Galaxy (including S6) devices (but not on Nexus devices or others, which is why my testing initially failed to reveal the issue). So, first, it is worth checking if the issue is device specific or not.

What I later found is that when pressing the back button while a Samsung virtual keyboard was displayed on a text field, the application would crash throwing this error - but not always!

Indeed, the text field causing the crash also happened to be displayed within a scrollview with fillViewPort="true" enabled.

What I found is that removing the fillViewPort option from the scrollview would not conflict with the Samsung keyboard being displayed/hidden. I suspect the issue is partly due to the fact that Samsung keyboards are different virtual keyboards than the stock Nexus keyboards, which is why only a subset of my users were experiencing the issue and it would crash on their devices only.

As a general rule, and if none of the other solutions suggested here apply to you, I would check if the issue is device specific, and also attempt to simplify the view I am working on until I can find the "culprit component" (component and view that, I should add, wasn't reported in the crash logs - so I only stumbled on the specific view causing the issue by chance!).

Sorry I cannot be more specific, but I hope this gives some pointers for further investigation if someone experience a similar but unexplained issue.