Is it possible to create a drawable that has some sort of animation, whether it is a frame by frame animation, rotation, etc, that is defined as a xml drawable and can be represented by a single Drawable object without having to deal with the animation in code?
How I am thinking to use it: I have a list and each item in this list may at sometime have something happening to it. While it is happening, I would like to have a spinning progress animation similar to a indeterminate ProgressBar. Since there may also be several of these on screen I thought that if they all shared the same Drawable they would only need one instance of it in memory and their animations would be synced so you wouldn't have a bunch of spinning objects in various points in the spinning animation.
I'm not attached to this approach. I'm just trying to think of the most efficient way to display several spinning progress animations and ideally have them synced together so they are consistent in appearance.
Thanks
In response to Sybiam's answer:
I have tried implementing a RotateDrawable but it is not rotating.
Here is my xml for the drawable so far:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rotate xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:drawable="@drawable/my_drawable_to_rotate"
android:fromDegrees="0"
android:toDegrees="360"
android:pivotX="50%"
android:pivotY="50%"
android:duration="800"
android:visible="true" />
I have tried using that drawable as the src and background of a ImageView and both ways only produced a non-rotating image.
Is there something that has to start the image rotation?
level is the interpulting value from 0 to 100000. the actual animation values are set by the setter methods
Yes! The (undocumented) key, which I discovered by reading the
ProgressBar
code is that you have to callDrawable.setLevel()
inonDraw()
in order for the<rotate>
thing to have any effect. TheProgressBar
works something like this (extra unimportant code omitted):The drawable XML:
In
onDraw()
:MAX_LEVEL
is a constant, and is always 10000 (according to the docs).ANIM_PERIOD
is the period of your animation in milliseconds.Unfortunately since you need to modify
onDraw()
you can't just put this drawable in anImageView
sinceImageView
never changes the drawable level. However you may be able to change the drawable level from outside theImageView
's.ProgressBar
(ab)uses anAlphaAnimation
to set the level. So you'd do something like this:It might work but I haven't tested it.
Edit
There is actually an
ImageView.setImageLevel()
method so it might be as simple as:Here is one of possible ways (especially useful when you have a Drawable somewhere set and need to animate it). The idea is to wrap the drawable and decorate it with animation. In my case, I had to rotate it, so below you can find sample implementation:
and you can use it like this (rotating toolbar navigation icon 360 degrees):
It shouldn't be hard to add a method that will rotate it indefinite (
setRepeatMode INFINITE for animator
)Drawables
There you go! And this one for RotateDrawable. I believe that from the Doc it should be pretty straitght forward. You can define everything in a xml file and set the background of a view as the drawable xml. /drawable/myrotate.xml -> @drawable/myrotate
Edit: This is an answer I found here. Drawable Rotating around its center Android
Edit 2: You are right the RotateDrawable seem broken. I don't know I tried it too. I haven't yet succeded in making it animate. But I did succed to rotate it. You have to use setLevel which will rotate it. Though it doesn't look really useful. I browsed the code and the RotateDrawable doesn't even inflate the animation duration and the current rotation seems strangely use the level as a measure for rotation. I believe you have to use it with a AnimationDrawable but here again. It just crashed for me. I haven't used that feature yet but planned to use it in the future. I browsed the web and the RotateDrawable seems to be very undocumented like almost every Drawable objects.
You can start from studying the ProgressBar2 from API Demos project (it is available as a part of the SDK). Specifically pay attention to
R.layout.progressbar_2
.