Adding text view to surface view

Question

i use this a s surface view in my application and now i want to add text view to this programmatically. How can i do that.

"<com.csfcse.udrawer.UdrawerDrawingSurface
  android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
  android:layout_height="fill_parent"
  android:id="@+id/drawingSurface" 
        android:layout_gravity="left" />"

Thanks......

Answer 1

This is not possible, a SurfaceView cannot contain other Views.

Answer 2

You'll need to use the Canvas and a corresponding text draw method:

drawText(String text, int index, int count, float x, float y, Paint paint).

Answer 3

An option may be to have a FrameLayout with two children, first the SurfaceView, then whatever you want to overlay on the SurfaceView. In the sample below, the second View in the FrameLayout is a horozontil LinearLayout with a Button and a TextView. The FrameLayout displays all its children as piled in Z order with the first child at the bottom and all children positioned at the upper left corner. In this case the LinearLayout has Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL (I think you could do the same thing with padding on the LinearLayout.

I have never found much (good) documentation about how SurfaceViews (or any of the screen drawing) works. There may be a problem with flickering or refresh, but I don't see much problem on my Froyo Evo. (This test app draws 'twirling' lines on the SurfaceView below the Button and TextView.

If the question is simply: How do you programmatically add a TextView to a Layout that was created by a XML inflated Layout, then, get a reference to the Layout instance and call addView() to it.

Layout lay = parentLayo.findViewById(R.id.drawingSurfaceParent);
TextView tv = new TextView(this);
tv.setText("New textview");
lay.addView(tv);