Defining Z order of views of RelativeLayout in Android

Question

I would like to define the z order of the views of a RelativeLayout in Android   I know one way of doing this is calling bringToFront   Is there are better way of doing this  It would be great if I could define the z order in the layout xml

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In Android starting from API level 21  items in the layout file get their Z order both from how they are ordered within the file  as described in correct answer  and from their elevation  a higher elevation value means the item gets a higher Z order    This can sometimes cause problems  especially with buttons that often appear on top of items that according to the order of the XML should be below them in Z order  To fix this just set the android elevation of the the items in your layout XML to match the Z order you want to achieve   I you set an elevation of an element in the layout it will start to cast a shadow  If you don t want this effect you can remove the shadow with code like so    if  Build VERSION SDK INT  gt   Build VERSION CODES LOLLIPOP       myView setOutlineProvider null       I haven t found any way to remove the shadow of a elevated view through the layout xml

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Please note  buttons and other elements in API 21 and greater have a high elevation  and therefore ignore the xml order of elements regardless of parent layout  Took me a while to figure that one out

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childView bringToFront   didn t work for me  so I set the Z translation of the least recently added item  the one that was overlaying all other children  to a negative value like so    lastView setTranslationZ -10    see https   developer android com reference android view View html setTranslationZ float  for more

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Please note that you can use view setZ float  starting from API level 21  Here you can find more info

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I encountered the same issues  In a relative layout parentView  I have 2 children childView1 and childView2  At first  I put childView1 above childView2 and I want childView1 to be on top of childView2  Changing the order of children views did not solve the problem for me  What worked for me is to set android clipChildren  false  on parentView and in the code I set   childView1 bringToFront     parentView invalidate

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API 21 has view setElevation float  build-in  Use ViewCompat setElevation view  float   for backward compatibility  More methods ViewCompat setZ v  pixels  and ViewCompat setTranslationZ v  pixels   Another way collect buttons or view array and use addView to add to RelativeLayout

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Thought I d add an answer since the introduction of the      android translationZ   XML field changed things a tad  The other answers that suggest running  childView1 bringToFront     parentView invalidate      are totally spot on EXCEPT for that this code will NOT bring childView1 in front of any view with a hardcoded android translationZ in the XML file  I was having problems with this  and once I removed this field from the other views  bringToFront   worked just fine

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If you want to do this in code you can do   View bringToFront      see docs

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Or put the overlapping button or views inside a FrameLayout  Then  the RelativeLayout in the xml file will respect the order of child layouts as they added

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You can use below code sample also for achieving the same  ViewCompat setElevation sourceView  ViewCompat getElevation mCardView  1     This is backward compatible  Here mCardView is a view which should be below sourceView

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The easiest way is simply to pay attention to the order in which the Views are added to your XML file  Lower down in the file means higher up in the Z-axis   Edit  This is documented here and here on the Android developer site   Thanks  flightplanner

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You can use custom RelativeLayout with redefined  protected int getChildDrawingOrder  int childCount  int i   Be aware - this method takes param i as  which view should I draw i th   This is how ViewPager works  It sets custom drawing order in conjuction with PageTransformer

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Check if you have any elevation on one of the Views in XML  If so  add elevation to the other item or remove the elevation to solve the issue  From there  it s the order of the views that dictates what comes above the other

[android] Defining Z order of views of RelativeLayout in Android

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