How to factorize layer code in Android development

Hello ! I’m Xavier Jouvenot and in this small post, we are going to see how to factorize layer code in Android development.

Self promotion: You can find other articles on my website 😉

Problematic

When developing an application, you may have some Activities, looking a lot alike, and this can, and will lead to a lot of duplicated layout description, or at least with layouts that are very similar from one Activity to the other.

Wouldn’t be great if we had a way to factorize such layout to make it easily reusable, like we factorize code into functions ?

Well, this blog post would not be here if there was none, so let’s take a look at the solution 😉

Solution

In Android layout, there is a handy tag named include, which does exactly what we want to. It allows us to create a "generic" layout and to reuse it in another layout like that:

<LinearLayout>

  <include layout="@layout/layout_name"/>

</LinearLayout>

In this simple example, we are including the layout named layout_name inside another layout. Every modification in the file describing layout_name will modify the elements everywhere it’s included, like in the LinearLayout of our example. That way, we can code our layout once and reuse it everywhere 🙂

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Thank you all for reading this article, And until my next article, have a splendid day 😉

Interesting links

• Include tag documentation