How to disable an Android button?

Question

I have created a layout that contains two buttons, Next and Previous. In between the buttons I'm generating some dynamic views. So when I first launch the application I want to disable the "Previous" button since there wont be any previous views. I also want to disable the "Next" button when there are not more views to display. Is there anyway to disable the buttons?

Answer 1

In my case,

myButton.setEnabled(false);
myButton.setEnabled(true);

is working fine and it is enabling and disabling the button as it should. But once the button state becomes disabled, it never goes back to the enabled state again, although it's clickable. I tried invalidating and refreshing the drawable state, but no luck.

myButton.invalidate();
myButton.refreshDrawableState();

If you or anyone having a similar issue, what works for me is setting the background drawable again. Works on any API Level.

myButton.setEnabled(true);
myButton.setBackgroundDrawable(activity.getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.myButtonDrawable));

Answer 2

Yes it can be disabled in XML just using <Button android:enabled="false" />

Answer 3

Did you try this?

myButton.setEnabled(false); 

Update: Thanks to Gwen. Almost forgot that android:clickable can be set in your XML layout to determine whether a button can be clickable or not.

Answer 4

You can't enable it or disable it in your XML (since your layout is set at runtime), but you can set if it's clickable at the launch of the activity with android:clickable.

Answer 5

first in xml make the button as android:clickable="false"

<Button
        android:id="@+id/btn_send"
        android:clickable="false"/>

then in your code, inside oncreate() method set the button property as

btn.setClickable(true);

then inside the button click change the code into

btn.setClickable(false);

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    btnSend = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btn_send);
    btnSend.setClickable(true);
    btnSend.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {

        @Override
        public void onClick(View v) {
            btnSend.setClickable(false);

        }
    });
}

Answer 6

In Java, once you have the reference of the button:

Button button = (Button) findviewById(R.id.button);

To enable/disable the button, you can use either:

button.setEnabled(false);
button.setEnabled(true);

Or:

button.setClickable(false);
button.setClickable(true);

Since you want to disable the button from the beginning, you can use button.setEnabled(false); in the onCreate method. Otherwise, from XML, you can directly use:

android:clickable = "false"

So:

<Button
        android:id="@+id/button"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:text="@string/button_text"
        android:clickable = "false" />