Determining the size of an Android view at runtime

Question

I am trying to apply an animation to a view in my Android app after my activity is created. To do this, I need to determine the current size of the view, and then set up an

Answer 1

There are actually multiple solutions, depending on the scenario:

1. The safe method, will work just before drawing the view, after the layout phase has finished:

public static void runJustBeforeBeingDrawn(final View view, final Runnable runnable) {
    final OnPreDrawListener preDrawListener = new OnPreDrawListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onPreDraw() {
            view.getViewTreeObserver().removeOnPreDrawListener(this);
            runnable.run();
            return true;
        }
    };
    view.getViewTreeObserver().addOnPreDrawListener(preDrawListener); 
}

Sample usage:

    ViewUtil.runJustBeforeBeingDrawn(yourView, new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            //Here you can safely get the view size (use "getWidth" and "getHeight"), and do whatever you wish with it
        }
    });

2. On some cases, it's enough to measure the size of the view manually:

view.measure(MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED, MeasureSpec.UNSPECIFIED);
int width=view.getMeasuredWidth(); 
int height=view.getMeasuredHeight();

If you know the size of the container:

    val widthMeasureSpec = View.MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(maxWidth, View.MeasureSpec.AT_MOST)
    val heightMeasureSpec = View.MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(maxHeight, View.MeasureSpec.AT_MOST)
    view.measure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec)
    val width=view.measuredWidth
    val height=view.measuredHeight

3. if you have a custom view that you've extended, you can get its size on the "onMeasure" method, but I think it works well only on some cases :

protected void onMeasure(final int widthMeasureSpec, final int heightMeasureSpec) {
    final int newHeight= MeasureSpec.getSize(heightMeasureSpec);
    final int newWidth= MeasureSpec.getSize(widthMeasureSpec);
    super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
}

4. If you write in Kotlin, you can use the next function, which behind the scenes works exactly like runJustBeforeBeingDrawn that I've written:

    view.doOnPreDraw { actionToBeTriggered() }
   

Note that you need to add this to gradle (found via here) :

android {
    kotlinOptions {
        jvmTarget = "1.8"
    }
}

implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:#.#'