Is it possibile to set hint Spinner in Android [duplicate]

Answer 1

You can setup your own spinner adapter and overide the getView method to show the hint instead of an item . I have created a sample project on github , check it out here

Answer 2

An even easier way than setting up your own spinner adapter is to just use a button and style it like a spinner object with

android:background="@android:drawable/btn_dropdown"

Then setup the button's onClick event to open a single-item-select dialog. You can then do whatever you want with the text of the button.

This has been my preferred way of handling this for a while. Hope it helps someone.

EDIT: I've been playing around with this again recently (and someone asked me to post an example a while ago). This strategy will look a bit different if you're using the Holo theme. However, if you're using other themes such as Theme.Black, this will look identical.

To demonstrate this, I made a simple app that has both a regular Spinner along with my custom button-spinner. I threw this up in a GitHub repo, but here's what the Activity looks like:

package com.stevebergamini.spinnerbutton;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.app.AlertDialog;
import android.content.DialogInterface;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.View.OnClickListener;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.Spinner;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {

    Spinner spinner1;
    Button button1;
    AlertDialog ad;
    String[] countries;

    int selected = -1;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

        spinner1 = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.spinner1);
        button1 = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button1);

        countries = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.country_names);

        //  You can also use an adapter for the allert dialog if you'd like
        //  ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item, countries);        

        ad = new AlertDialog.Builder(MainActivity.this).setSingleChoiceItems(countries, selected,  
                new  DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {

                        @Override
                        public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
                            button1.setText(countries[which]);
                            selected = which;
                            ad.dismiss();

                        }}).setTitle(R.string.select_country).create(); 


        button1.setOnClickListener( new OnClickListener(){

            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                ad.getListView().setSelection(selected);
                ad.show();              
            }});

    }
}

Answer 3

Here's a solution which is probably a bit simpler than Ravi Vyas code (thanks for the inspiration!):

ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(getActivity(), android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item) {

    @Override
    public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {

        View v = super.getView(position, convertView, parent);
        if (position == getCount()) {
            ((TextView)v.findViewById(android.R.id.text1)).setText("");
            ((TextView)v.findViewById(android.R.id.text1)).setHint(getItem(getCount())); //"Hint to be displayed"
        }

        return v;
    }       

    @Override
    public int getCount() {
        return super.getCount()-1; // you dont display last item. It is used as hint.
    }

};

adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);
adapter.add("Item 1");
adapter.add("Item 2");
adapter.add("Hint to be displayed");

spinner.setAdapter(adapter);
spinner.setSelection(adapter.getCount()); //display hint