What does it mean to inflate a view from an xml file?

Question

I am new to android development and keep coming across references to Inflating views from a layout xml file. I googled and searched the development guide but still wasn\'t

Answer 1

Inflating is the process of adding a view (.xml) to activity on runtime. When we create a listView we inflate each of its items dynamically. If we want to create a ViewGroup with multiple views like buttons and textview, we can create it like so:

Button but = new Button();
but.setText ="button text";
but.background ...
but.leftDrawable.. and so on...

TextView txt = new TextView();
txt.setText ="button text";
txt.background ... and so on...

Then we have to create a layout where we can add above views:

RelativeLayout rel = new RelativeLayout();

rel.addView(but);

And now if we want to add a button in the right-corner and a textview on the bottom, we have to do a lot of work. First by instantiating the view properties and then applying multiple constraints. This is time consuming.

Android makes it easy for us to create a simple .xml and design its style and attributes in xml and then simply inflate it wherever we need it without the pain of setting constraints programatically.

LayoutInflater inflater = 
              (LayoutInflater)getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
View menuLayout = inflater.inflate(R.layout.your_menu_layout, mainLayout, true);
//now add menuLayout to wherever you want to add like

(RelativeLayout)findViewById(R.id.relative).addView(menuLayout);