Adding Search Functionality to Your Android Application Activity with SearchView and Search Dialog

If you’re building an android application, then most likely you’ll need to implement a search in it to let the user search through a set of data that could be emails, messages, chats, photos, files, etc. Android provides us with a search widget called SearchView that provides a user interface for the user to enter a search query and submit the request. The preferred way to use this widget to provide search in our application is to use it in the action bar.

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Quick Tip: Android Change Action Bar SearchView Hint (Placeholder) and Text Color

There are times when you’ll want to change the hint (placeholder) color and the text color of a SearchView widget. Here’s a small snippet that’ll allow us to do it:

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Understanding Android Spinners and Populating Them with (Adding) a Set of Items

Spinners in Android are like select dropdowns (HTML) of web development. Once tapped, it shows a list of options in a dropdown menu from which one can select a value. It is very simple to add it as a View in the Layout file (just as any other view like TextView or EditView):

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Android Dividing Your ListView Into Sections with Group Headers

ListView is commonly used to display a set of data in a list. For example a list of emails, messages, tasks or contacts. I’ve written an article on how to work with lists in android before, which you might want to read.

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Understanding and Implementing Android Lists with ListView, ExpandableListView, ListFragment, ListActivity and Custom List Adapters

There are times when you want to display data as a list. For example a list of emails, a list of messages, a list of tweets, a list of post titles, a list of photos with their titles and other meta data like dates and summary. Android provides 2 classes with the help of which we can achieve a scrollable list of items in our mobile application:

  • ListView – Show items in a vertically scrolling list.
  • ExpandableListView – Similar to ListView but supports grouping of items that can be expanded individually to show its childrens.

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