android layout resizing parent without resizing the childs

android, android-animation, android-layout, width

Solution

Your problem comes from several issues.

- first : the `singleLine="false"` parameter on your `TextViews` > With this parameter, you can't ask it to wrap its content, since the text can use multiple lines and thus don't have a proper width. If there are more than one line it will fill its parent.

- second: The behaviour of "wrap_content" is to fit the content size unless its bigger than the parent. in this case, it will match the parent size again. (we can see, from padding or margin movements, than borders are following the parent size.)

The second issue can be solved by using fixed size but its not the case with the first point :

You could set `singleLine="true"`, with `android:width="wrap_content"` to see it working on a single line. (set `android:ellipsize="none"` in order to hide the '...' moving around) But a single line text isn't what you need right ?

I've made tests with a extend of `TextView` in order to avoid those views from resizing, even with multiple lines :

public class NoResizeTextView extends TextView {

    int firstWidth = -1;
    int firstHeight = -1;

    public NoResizeTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);

        Layout layout = getLayout();
        if (layout != null) {

            if (firstWidth == -1)
                firstWidth = getMeasuredWidth();
            if (firstHeight == -1)
                firstHeight = getMeasuredHeight();

            setMeasuredDimension(firstWidth, firstHeight);
        }
    }

}

Then use this TextView extend in your layout :

       <com.guian.collapsetest.NoResizeTextView
                android:layout_width="wrap_content"
                android:layout_height="wrap_content"
                android:ellipsize="none"
                android:singleLine="false"
                android:text="Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit" >
        </com.guian.collapsetest.NoResizeTextView>

That's not really beautiful and I don't advise to use it too much since it could break android's layout mecanism. But in your particular case, I guess it does the job.

Logic :

When you extend a view to create a custom one, you are responsible for the implementation of `onMeasure`. This is what give its size to your view. So that's how it works : you compute once the size ( or let the default function do it for you thanx to `getMeasuredW/H`) and save it, then on each request for size, you just return the same values so your view size won't change.

Limitations :

Sine your view size won't change, it can have a bad behaviour when changing screen orientation / parent size or again, when the text inside change (As Vikram said). That's what I called "break android layout mecanism". If you need to change the text dynamically, you would have to extend the setText method to allow it to resize at this point ...

Problem

Original source