How to add a custom adapter to an AutoCompleteTextView

Question

Is there any simple way to set a 2 TextView dropdown to an AutoCompleteTextView.

There is android.R.layout.two_line_list_item Which I couldn\'t find any exa

Answer 1

I believe that the easiest approach is to extend SimpleAdapter.

public class MyAdapter extends android.widget.SimpleAdapter {

    static ArrayList> toMapList(Collection objectsCollection) {
        ArrayList> objectsList = new ArrayList>(objectsCollection.size());
        for (MyObject obj : objectsCollection) {
            Map map = new HashMap();
            map.put("name", obj.getName());
            map.put("details", obj.getDetails());
            objectsList.add(map);
        };
        return objectsList;
    }

    public MyAdapter(Context context, Collection objects) {

        super(context, toMapList(objects),
              R.layout.auto_complete_layout, new String[] {"name", "description"}, new int[] {R.id.name, R.id.description});
    }
}

The major drawback is that this will bring candidates based on any space-delimited word in either name or description. If you add another field to your auto_complete_layout, it will be involved in matching, too.

Therefore, I finished with rewriting the SimpleAdapter to better fit my needs, removing a significant amount of the base class overhead which was not relevant for my use case. But the few lines above give you a good start, and provide a solid reference to start customization from.