Label in a editbox in android

Question

My question is, how to put a label in a editBox in android ?

Like for example, i want to put \"To:\" in editbox of a contact picke

Answer 1

I give you two ideas to do this :

If you only need this in a couple of places, you can use a FrameLayout / merge to have a TextView over your EditText. Then using a padding on the edit text, you can make it seem like the TextView is "inside" the EditText. :

Else you can inplement your own version of EditText, by writing your own Class. Here's a basic example, you'd need to tweak it a little :

import android.content.Context;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.graphics.Rect;
import android.text.TextPaint;
import android.util.AttributeSet;
import android.widget.EditText;

public class LabelledEditText extends EditText {

    public LabelledEditText(Context context) {
        super(context);
        mPaddingLeft = getPaddingLeft();
    }

    public LabelledEditText(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        mPaddingLeft = getPaddingLeft();
    }

    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
        TextPaint textPaint = getPaint();
        Rect size = new Rect();
        textPaint.getTextBounds(mLabel, 0, mLabel.length(), size);
        setPadding(mPaddingLeft + size.width(), getPaddingTop(), getPaddingRight(), getPaddingBottom());
        super.onDraw(canvas);

        canvas.drawText(mLabel, mPaddingLeft + size.left, size.bottom + getPaddingTop(), textPaint);
    }


    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
    }

    private String mLabel = "To :  ";
    private int mPaddingLeft;

}