Single selection in RecyclerView

Question

I know there are no default selection methods in recyclerview class, But I have tried in following way,

public void onBindViewHolder(ViewHolder holder, final         


        

Answer 1

This happens because RecyclerView, as the name suggests, does a good job at recycling its ViewHolders. This means that every ViewHolder, when it goes out of sight (actually, it takes a little more than going out of sight, but it makes sense to simplify it that way), it is recycled; this implies that the RecyclerView takes this ViewHolder that is already inflated and replaces its elements with the elements of another item in your data set.

Now, what is going on here is that once you scroll down and your first, selected, ViewHolders go out of sight, they are being recycled and used for other positions of your data set. Once you go up again, the ViewHolders that were bound to the first 5 items are not necessarely the same, now.

This is why you should keep an internal variable in your adapter that remembers the selection state of each item. This way, in the onBindViewHolder method, you can know if the item whose ViewHolder is currently being bound was selected or not, and modify a View accordingly, in this case your RadioButton's state (though I would suggest to use a CheckBox if you plan on selecting multiple items).

If you want to learn more about RecyclerView and its inner workings, I invite you to check FancyAdapters, a project I started on GitHub. It is a collection of adapters that implement selection, drag&drop of elements and swipe to dismiss capabilities. Maybe by checking the code you can obtain a good understanding on how RecyclerView works.