getView called with wrong position when scrolling fast

Question

fairly new Android developer here.

I\'ve come across a strange problem that I\'m not sure how to work around. I\'ve read a lot of problems around here that sound lik

Answer 1

You are correct that ListView is reusing views in different places on the screen. It's an optimization to keep memory use reasonable and speedy by not allocating new views all the time.

Chances are that you're using LiewView incorrectly. Watch this talk on how to properly use ListView to get the whole story, but here's the highlights:

1. "Position" refers to the location of your data in the adapter list. If your adapter data is in an array, this would be the index into that array.
2. "ID" refers to the value of the data itself. If you have a list of names and resort them, their position will change, but their ID will not.
3. "Index" refers to the relative location of a view with respect to the viewable screen area. You'll probably never need this.
4. Do not manipulate views (or attempt to cache them) outside of your adapter's getView() method or you will get strange behavior.
5. If the call to getView(int, View, ViewGroup) provides a view instance, populate its fields instead of inflating totally new views. Assuming you've correctly implemented getItemType(), you'll always get the right View type to repopulate.
6. Make your getView() method as fast as you possibly can, and only do heavy lifting on other threads.
7. Just because the container called getView() doesn't necessarily mean the data will be displayed. The framework uses these for measurement purposes. Since the work could be thrown away, this is another reason to make sure that getView() is as fast as you can make it.
8. When something happens to your data which you need to show on screen, say your download is complete, that's when you call notifyDataSetChanged(). Don't fiddle with the views directly, they'll be populated on the next UI loop when it gets redrawn.

Having just spent a few days reworking a ListView that was implemented naively, I feel your pain. The results have been worth it, though!

Answer 2

getViewis called for every list item that needs to be drawn but was previously not visible on screen. If you scroll fast you might get strange positions but that should not cause errors as you describe (I guess Android has no error here since those ListViews are pretty well tested). E.g. when you scroll fast enough you might have 2 views that need to get drawn. Maybe there is something else wrong in your code.

Answer 3

always use this approach in getview: convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.listinflate, parent, false);

And let your activity implements onScrollListener and when the user is flinging notify your listview adapter to never mind taking efforts to update the items correctly. and when the user is no more flinging tell the adapter to take care about providing data in getView.

That solved my all problems. And one more thing do not use wrap_content in the list view height. set smoothscroll false in it too.

Answer 4

i had the same problem: into the adapter i was changing background color in the getView method but sometimes the listview was "reciclyng" views (getting the wrong background). I solved simply putting "else" to each

if(...){changeBackground}

I added

else {restore default background}

And then it worked smoothly

Answer 5

For the record and extending the answer of @Mark

Android does the next task. Let's say that i have a list with 100 elements. Whem you are loading, getview is called for the element 0,1,2,3... to 10 for example. And if we continued, the next position will be the 11. However, the position 11 recycles the same view than the position 0. So, the view for the position 11 exists but it has the wrong value (the 0 value).

Answer: Modify the data if the view is null or not. If the view is null, then deflate and modify the values of the view. If not, the modify the values of the view.

Lets say that i have a item_view (layout) with a single textview, then the adapter should be as follow:

Right version:

public class XXXAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<XXX> {....
@NonNull
@Override
public View getView(int position, @Nullable View convertView, @NonNull ViewGroup parent) {
   if (convertView==null) {
       LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(this.getContext());
       convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.**itemofthelayout**, parent, false);
   }
   ***Object** item=this.getItem(position);
   TextView txt= (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.**idsometextviewinsidelayout**);
   txt.setText(String.valueOf(position));
   return convertView;
   // return super.getView(position, convertView, parent);
}

Wrong version:

public class XXXAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<XXX> {....
@NonNull
@Override
public View getView(int position, @Nullable View convertView, @NonNull ViewGroup parent) {
   if (convertView==null) {
       LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(this.getContext());
       convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.**itemofthelayout**, parent, false);
       ***Object** item=this.getItem(position);
       TextView txt= (TextView) convertView.findViewById(R.id.**idsometextviewinsidelayout**);
       txt.setText(String.valueOf(position));
       return convertView;
       // return super.getView(position, convertView, parent);
   }
}