CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidviewandroid-viewandroid-viewholder
Eugene
Eugene

Reputation: 60244

What is the main purpose of setTag() getTag() methods of View?

What is the main purpose of such methods as setTag() and getTag() of View type objects?

Am I right in thinking that I can associate any number of objects with a single View?

Upvotes: 461

Views: 288499

Answers (7)

Andrei Buneyeu
Andrei Buneyeu

Reputation: 6680

I'd like to add few words.

Although using get/setTag(Object) seems to be very useful in the particular case of a ViewHolder pattern, I'd recommend to think twice before using it in other cases. There is almost always another solution with better design.

The main reason is that code like that becomes unsupportable pretty quickly.

  • It is non-obvious for other developers what you designed to store as tag in the view. The methods setTag/getTag are not descriptive at all.

  • It just stores an Object, which requires to be cast when you want to getTag. You can get unexpected crashes later when you decide to change the type of stored object in the tag.

  • Here's a real-life story: We had a pretty big project with a lot of adapters, async operations with views and so on. One developer decided to set/getTag in his part of code, but another one had already set the tag to this view. In the end, someone couldn't find his own tag and was very confused. It cost us several hours to find the bug.

setTag(int key, Object tag) looks much better, cause you can generate unique keys for every tag (using id resources), but there is a significant restriction for Android < 4.0. From Lint docs:

Prior to Android 4.0, the implementation of View.setTag(int, Object) would store the objects in a static map, where the values were strongly referenced. This means that if the object contains any references pointing back to the context, the context (which points to pretty much everything else) will leak. If you pass a view, the view provides a reference to the context that created it. Similarly, view holders typically contain a view, and cursors are sometimes also associated with views.

Upvotes: 142

Matthew
Matthew

Reputation: 44919

Let's say you generate a bunch of views that are similar. You could set an OnClickListener for each view individually:

button1.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener ... );
button2.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener ... );
 ...

Then you have to create a unique onClick method for each view even if they do the similar things, like:

public void onClick(View v) {
    doAction(1); // 1 for button1, 2 for button2, etc.
}

This is because onClick has only one parameter, a View, and it has to get other information from instance variables or final local variables in enclosing scopes. What we really want is to get information from the views themselves.

Enter getTag/setTag:

button1.setTag(1);
button2.setTag(2);

Now we can use the same OnClickListener for every button:

listener = new OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        doAction(v.getTag());
    }
};

It's basically a way for views to have memories.

Upvotes: 671

user5053330
user5053330

Reputation:

Setting of TAGs is really useful when you have a ListView and want to recycle/reuse the views. In that way the ListView is becoming very similar to the newer RecyclerView.

@Override
public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent)
  {
ViewHolder holder = null;

if ( convertView == null )
{
    /* There is no view at this position, we create a new one. 
       In this case by inflating an xml layout */
    convertView = mInflater.inflate(R.layout.listview_item, null);  
    holder = new ViewHolder();
    holder.toggleOk = (ToggleButton) convertView.findViewById( R.id.togOk );
    convertView.setTag (holder);
}
else
{
    /* We recycle a View that already exists */
    holder = (ViewHolder) convertView.getTag ();
}

// Once we have a reference to the View we are returning, we set its values.

// Here is where you should set the ToggleButton value for this item!!!

holder.toggleOk.setChecked( mToggles.get( position ) );

return convertView;
}

Upvotes: 14

Saad Bilal
Saad Bilal

Reputation: 1837

Unlike IDs, tags are not used to identify views. Tags are essentially an extra piece of information that can be associated with a view. They are most often used as a convenience to store data related to views in the views themselves rather than by putting them in a separate structure.

Reference: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html

Upvotes: 14

Ramkailash
Ramkailash

Reputation: 1850

We can use setTag() and getTag() to set and get custom objects as per our requirement. The setTag() method takes an argument of type Object, and getTag() returns an Object.

For example,

Person p = new Person();
p.setName("Ramkailash");
p.setId(2000001);
button1.setTag(p);

Upvotes: 28

shubniggurath
shubniggurath

Reputation: 208

This is very useful for custom ArrayAdapter using. It is some kind of optimization. There setTag used as reference to object that references on some parts of layout (that displaying in ListView) instead of findViewById.

static class ViewHolder {
    TextView tvPost;
    TextView tvDate;
    ImageView thumb;
}

public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {

    if (convertView == null) {
        LayoutInflater inflater = myContext.getLayoutInflater();
        convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.postitem, null);

        ViewHolder vh = new ViewHolder();
        vh.tvPost = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.postTitleLabel);
        vh.tvDate = (TextView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.postDateLabel);
        vh.thumb = (ImageView)convertView.findViewById(R.id.postThumb);
        convertView.setTag(vh);
    }
            ....................
}

Upvotes: 16

Oren
Oren

Reputation: 1006

For web developers, this seems to be the equivalent to data-..

Upvotes: 22

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