What does it mean to inflate a view from an xml file

Question

I am new to android development and keep coming across references to Inflating views from a layout xml file   I googled and searched the development guide but still wasn t able to pick up a sense for what it means   If someone could provide a very simple example  it d be much appreciated

User · Accepted Answer

When you write an XML layout  it will be inflated by the Android OS which basically means that it will be rendered by creating view object in memory  Let s call that implicit inflation  the OS will inflate the view for you   For instance   class Name extends Activity      public void onCreate                the OS will inflate the your layout xml             file and use it for this activity          setContentView R layout your layout             You can also inflate views explicitly by using the LayoutInflater  In that case you have to    Get an instance of the LayoutInflater Specify the XML to inflate Use the returned View Set the content view with returned view  above    For instance   LayoutInflater inflater   LayoutInflater from YourActivity this      1 View theInflatedView   inflater inflate R layout your layout  null      2 and 3 setContentView theInflatedView     4

User · Answer

Inflating is the process of adding a view   xml  to activity on runtime  When we create a listView we inflate each of its items dynamically  If we want to create a ViewGroup with multiple views like buttons and textview  we can create it like so    Button but   new Button    but setText   button text   but background     but leftDrawable   and so on     TextView txt   new TextView    txt setText   button text   txt background     and so on      Then we have to create a layout where we can add above views   RelativeLayout rel   new RelativeLayout     rel addView but     And now if we want to add a button in the right-corner and a textview on the bottom  we have to do a lot of work  First by instantiating the view properties and then applying multiple constraints  This is time consuming   Android makes it easy for us to create a simple  xml and design its style and attributes in xml and then simply inflate it wherever we need it without the pain of setting constraints programatically   LayoutInflater inflater                   LayoutInflater getSystemService Context LAYOUT INFLATER SERVICE   View menuLayout   inflater inflate R layout your menu layout  mainLayout  true     now add menuLayout to wherever you want to add like   RelativeLayout findViewById R id relative  addView menuLayout

User · Answer

Inflating  a view means taking the layout XML and parsing it to create the view and viewgroup objects from the elements and their attributes specified within  and then adding the hierarchy of those views and viewgroups to the parent ViewGroup   When you call setContentView    it attaches the views it creates from reading the XML to the activity   You can also use LayoutInflater to add views to another ViewGroup  which can be a useful tool in a lot of circumstances

User · Answer

Because we make UI into XML but view objects is what we display so we somehow need to convert xml into view objects so inflating means we are converting xml into view objects so that it can be displayed  for this we need a service called layout inflator service and give it an xml and it will be convert for you

User · Answer

I think here  inflating a view  means fetching the layout xml file drawing a view specified in that xml file and POPULATING     inflating   the parent viewGroup with the created View

User · Answer

A layman definition for inflation might be to convert the XML code to Java code  Just a way to understand  e g   if we have a  tag in XML  OS has to create a corresponding Java object in memory  so inflatter reads the XMLtags  and creates the corresponding objects in Java

[android] What does it mean to inflate a view from an xml file?

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