Changing/using multiple layouts within the same activity?

Question

I am new to android programming but have a pretty strong Java background. I am working on creating a fairly simple game that involves progressing through various short "levels", and the whole thing is timed, the objective being to get the fastest time possible. I put levels in quotations because they are very short, and mainly involve doing a few simple tasks (i.e. clicking a button) before progressing to the next one. As a result instead of creating a different activity for each level, I decided to keep everything within one activity and when a user completes all of the tasks for one level, a different layout is set-up using the setContentView() method. My problem is that every time I switch layouts, I need to reset my pointers to the buttons using findViewById() even though they are named the same. If someone could explain why I need to do this that would be very helpful? Also, as I am fairly new to android, perhaps I am not going about this in the most efficient way? Any suggestions would be welcome and appreciated.

Also I think this is probably related, but I have a chronometer that I want to be persistent across the layouts? I have seen in other questions that this is not possible across activities, but I wanted to check on the case of across layouts.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Edit: Thank you ania, viewflipper looks like the perfect solution

Edit: So after some experimenting with the ViewFlipper I have decided to use it for my project. While it does not solve the issue of having to re-add the buttons with every new level(this I solved by giving each button a distinct name, even across all layouts), it did give me some nice animation effects as well as the convenience of using showNext and showPrevious methods.

Answer 1

Did you try ViewFlipper? It seems like perfect solution in this case.