Does Android have an equivalent to Cocoa's viewDidLoad and viewDidAppear functions?
If not, then how would I go about performing an action when a View appears? My app is a tabbed application, in which one of the tabs is a list of forum topics. I would like the topic list to be refreshed every time the view appears. Is such a thing possible in Android?
The Activity class has onCreate and onResume methods that are pretty analagous to viewDidLoad and viewDidAppear.
Activity.onResume
EDIT
To add to this, since some have mentioned in the comments that the view tree is not yet fully available during these callbacks, there is the ViewTreeObserver that you can listen to if you need first access to the view hierarchy. Here is a sample of how you can use the ViewTreeObserver to achieve this.
View someView = findViewById(R.id.someView);
final ViewTreeObserver obs = someView.getViewTreeObserver();
obs.addOnPreDrawListener(new OnPreDrawListener() {
public boolean onPreDraw() {
obs.removeOnPreDrawListener(this);
doMyCustomLogic();
return true;
}
});
onResume() is more like viewCouldAppear. :) public void onWindowFocusChanged(boolean) is the closest to viewDidAppear. At this point within the activity lifecycle you may ask the view about its size.
From my limited, nascent understanding of Android, you implement viewDidLoad type functionality in the onCreate method of your Activity:
onCreate(Bundle) is where you
initialize your activity. Most
importantly, here you will usually
call setContentView(int) with a layout
resource defining your UI, and using
findViewById(int) to retrieve the
widgets in that UI that you need to
interact with programmatically.
The equivalent for viewDidAppear is closer to the onResume method:
Called after
onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle),
onRestart(), or onPause(), for your
activity to start interacting with the
user. This is a good place to begin
animations, open exclusive-access
devices (such as the camera), etc.