How do I display the current value of an Android P

Question

This must come up very often.

When the user is editing preferences in an Android app, I'd like them to be able to see the currently set value of the preference in the Preference summary.

Example: if I have a Preference setting for "Discard old messages" that specifies the number of days after which messages need to be cleaned up. In the PreferenceActivity I'd like the user to see:

"Discard old messages" <- title

"Clean up messages after x days" <- summary where x is the current Preference value

Extra credit: make this reusable, so I can easily apply it to all my preferences regardless of their type (so that it work with EditTextPreference, ListPreference etc. with minimal amount of coding).

Answer 1

Here is my solution... FWIW

package com.example.PrefTest;

import android.content.SharedPreferences;
import android.content.SharedPreferences.OnSharedPreferenceChangeListener;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.preference.EditTextPreference;
import android.preference.ListPreference;
import android.preference.Preference;
import android.preference.PreferenceActivity;
import android.preference.PreferenceGroup;
import android.preference.PreferenceManager;

public class Preferences extends PreferenceActivity implements
        OnSharedPreferenceChangeListener {

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences);
        PreferenceManager.setDefaultValues(Preferences.this, R.xml.preferences,
            false);
        initSummary(getPreferenceScreen());
    }

    @Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();
        // Set up a listener whenever a key changes
        getPreferenceScreen().getSharedPreferences()
                .registerOnSharedPreferenceChangeListener(this);
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        // Unregister the listener whenever a key changes
        getPreferenceScreen().getSharedPreferences()
                .unregisterOnSharedPreferenceChangeListener(this);
    }

    public void onSharedPreferenceChanged(SharedPreferences sharedPreferences,
            String key) {
        updatePrefSummary(findPreference(key));
    }

    private void initSummary(Preference p) {
        if (p instanceof PreferenceGroup) {
            PreferenceGroup pGrp = (PreferenceGroup) p;
            for (int i = 0; i < pGrp.getPreferenceCount(); i++) {
                initSummary(pGrp.getPreference(i));
            }
        } else {
            updatePrefSummary(p);
        }
    }

    private void updatePrefSummary(Preference p) {
        if (p instanceof ListPreference) {
            ListPreference listPref = (ListPreference) p;
            p.setSummary(listPref.getEntry());
        }
        if (p instanceof EditTextPreference) {
            EditTextPreference editTextPref = (EditTextPreference) p;
            if (p.getTitle().toString().toLowerCase().contains("password"))
            {
                p.setSummary("******");
            } else {
                p.setSummary(editTextPref.getText());
            }
        }
        if (p instanceof MultiSelectListPreference) {
            EditTextPreference editTextPref = (EditTextPreference) p;
            p.setSummary(editTextPref.getText());
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

My option is to extend ListPreference and it's clean:

public class ListPreferenceShowSummary extends ListPreference {

    private final static String TAG = ListPreferenceShowSummary.class.getName();

    public ListPreferenceShowSummary(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        init();
    }

    public ListPreferenceShowSummary(Context context) {
        super(context);
        init();
    }

    private void init() {

        setOnPreferenceChangeListener(new OnPreferenceChangeListener() {

            @Override
            public boolean onPreferenceChange(Preference arg0, Object arg1) {
                arg0.setSummary(getEntry());
                return true;
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public CharSequence getSummary() {
        return super.getEntry();
    }
}

Then you add in your settings.xml:

<yourpackage.ListPreferenceShowSummary
    android:key="key" android:title="title"
    android:entries="@array/entries" android:entryValues="@array/values"
    android:defaultValue="first value"/>

Answer 3

I've seen all voted answers show how to set the summary with the exact current value, but the OP wanted also something like:

"Clean up messages after x days"* <- summary where x is the current Preference value

Here is my answer for achieving that

As documentation says about ListPreference.getSummary():

Returns the summary of this ListPreference. If the summary has a String formatting marker in it (i.e. "%s" or "%1$s"), then the current entry value will be substituted in its place.

However, I tried on several devices and it doesn't seem to work. With some research, I found a good solution in this answer. It simply consists of extending every Preference you use and override getSummary() to work as specified by Android documentation.

Answer 4

If you only want to display the plain text value of each field as its summary, the following code should be the easiest to maintain. It requires only two changes (lines 13 and 21, marked with "change here"):

package com.my.package;

import android.content.SharedPreferences;
import android.content.SharedPreferences.OnSharedPreferenceChangeListener;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.preference.EditTextPreference;
import android.preference.ListPreference;
import android.preference.Preference;
import android.preference.PreferenceActivity;

public class PreferencesActivity extends PreferenceActivity implements OnSharedPreferenceChangeListener {

    private final String[] mAutoSummaryFields = { "pref_key1", "pref_key2", "pref_key3" }; // change here
    private final int mEntryCount = mAutoSummaryFields.length;
    private Preference[] mPreferenceEntries;

    @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences_file); // change here
        mPreferenceEntries = new Preference[mEntryCount];
        for (int i = 0; i < mEntryCount; i++) {
            mPreferenceEntries[i] = getPreferenceScreen().findPreference(mAutoSummaryFields[i]);
        }
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
    @Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();
        for (int i = 0; i < mEntryCount; i++) {
            updateSummary(mAutoSummaryFields[i]); // initialization
        }
        getPreferenceScreen().getSharedPreferences().registerOnSharedPreferenceChangeListener(this); // register change listener
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("deprecation")
    @Override
    protected void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        getPreferenceScreen().getSharedPreferences().unregisterOnSharedPreferenceChangeListener(this); // unregister change listener
    }

    private void updateSummary(String key) {
        for (int i = 0; i < mEntryCount; i++) {
            if (key.equals(mAutoSummaryFields[i])) {
                if (mPreferenceEntries[i] instanceof EditTextPreference) {
                    final EditTextPreference currentPreference = (EditTextPreference) mPreferenceEntries[i];
                    mPreferenceEntries[i].setSummary(currentPreference.getText());
                }
                else if (mPreferenceEntries[i] instanceof ListPreference) {
                    final ListPreference currentPreference = (ListPreference) mPreferenceEntries[i];
                    mPreferenceEntries[i].setSummary(currentPreference.getEntry());
                }
                break;
            }
        }
    }

    public void onSharedPreferenceChanged(SharedPreferences sharedPreferences, String key) {
        updateSummary(key);
    }

}

Answer 5

You have to use bindPreferenceSummaryToValue function on the onCreate method.

Example:

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        // Add 'general' preferences, defined in the XML file
        addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.pref_general);

        // For all preferences, attach an OnPreferenceChangeListener so the UI summary can be
        // updated when the preference changes.
        bindPreferenceSummaryToValue(findPreference(getString(R.string.pref_location_key)));
        bindPreferenceSummaryToValue(findPreference(getString(R.string.pref_units_key)));
    }

See lesson 3 on Udacity Android Course: https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud853/l-1474559101/e-1643578599/m-1643578601

Answer 6

There are ways to make this a more generic solution, if that suits your needs.

For example, if you want to generically have all list preferences show their choice as summary, you could have this for your onSharedPreferenceChanged implementation:

public void onSharedPreferenceChanged(SharedPreferences sharedPreferences, String key) {
    Preference pref = findPreference(key);

    if (pref instanceof ListPreference) {
        ListPreference listPref = (ListPreference) pref;
        pref.setSummary(listPref.getEntry());
    }
}

This is easily extensible to other preference classes.

And by using the getPreferenceCount and getPreference functionality in PreferenceScreen and PreferenceCategory, you could easily write a generic function to walk the preference tree setting the summaries of all preferences of the types you desire to their toString representation