setVisibility(View.VISIBLE) doesn't always work. Ideas?

Question

I am trying to show a pair of hidden buttons (using setVisibility(View.VISIBLE), within a RelativeLayout), but it doesn\'t always work. The button

Answer 1

SurfaceView is the sole culprit (of course, this also applies to GLSurfaceView, RSSurfaceView and VideoView, all of which inherits from SurfaceView). It exposes lots of weird behaviours when dealing with other views on top of it. Playing with View.setVisibility() is one of those issues. Clearly, SurfaceView has not been designed to be used with other views (even though the official doc says it ought to be) but as a standalone view for videos, games or OpenGL stuffs.

For the visibility issue, I've found that using View.GONE instead of View.INVISIBLE resolve it. If you don't want to use GONE, try changing the focus for example (and back to the one that had focus before), or changing other states. The goal is to wake up the underlying UI system somehow.

In short: when something weird happens with your views and you have a SurfaceView (or subclass) somewhere, try replacing it with something else so you don't lose hours searching what you're doing wrong when you're doing it right (and no false beliefs). This way, you know SurfaceView is to blame and you can hack around it with beautiful comments to piss on it without qualms.

Answer 2

For the record: I had this problem, tried a bunch of random stuff (thanks Alex!), and in my case what solved it was doing seekBar.requestLayout() directly after the setVisible on the very seekbar that was refusing to show.

Answer 3

This is my Solution

setAlpha(0)
btnName.setAlpha(0)

Is working for all views like => Buttons - Images - Texts and ...

Answer 4

I (annoyingly) had similar difficulty with having a button on top of a SurfaceView preview and had to put the Button in a RelativeLayout and make the RelativeLayout VISIBLE/INVISIBLE. Might be worth a shot for anyone else having the same issue.

...And I also had to programatically call the layout to be brought to from: buttonLayout.bringToFront() right after findViewById.

Answer 5

In my case View.VISIBLE/View.GONE was not working always. When I switched my toggle to View.VISIBLE/View.INVISIBLE it started to work as intended.