Find all the views containing a particular keyword in Tag

anchit

26 October 2021

While making dynamic views in your android application, we often feel the need to find all the views containing a particular keyword in Tag, associated with the view itself so that we can perform some action on all of the views later.In this blog, we will learn how to Find all the views containing a particular keyword in Tag.

Implementing this is super easy, all you need to know is familiarity with the lists and recursion. The simple plain logic of adding to the list will get you the desired result.

APPROACH:

While creating dynamic views you need to add a particular Tag keyword that you will later use to search all the views.
Create a function that takes in a root view to traverse and the tag keyword as input and returns an ArrayList of views.
In the function, you just created traverse the whole root view.
While traversing compare the tag of the current child and if the keyword to be searched is contained in the Tag of the child, add this to the list to be returned
If the Current Child is a viewGroup then add all the child views containing the tag by adding to the returning list through recursion.

That’s it conceptually you have obtained the desired result. Let’s have a look at the code.

CODE:

Function to get all the views:

private static ArrayList<View> getViewsByTag(ViewGroup root, String tagKey ){

ArrayList<View> views = new ArrayList<View>();

final int childCount = root.getChildCount();

for (int i = 0; i < childCount; i++) {

final View child = root.getChildAt(i);

if (child instanceof ViewGroup) {

views.addAll(getViewsByTag((ViewGroup) child, tagKey));

}

final Object tagObj = child.getTag();

if (tagObj != null && tagObj.toString().contains(tagKey)) {

views.add(child);

}

return views;

}

Using it in your code :

ArrayList<View> views = getViewsByTag(my_root_view,"my_tag");

for (View view: views) {

view.setVisibility(View.GONE); // Add Your Logic Here

}

// REPLACE my_root_view with your view whose all childs you want to search

// REPLACE my_tag with your tag keyword, you want to use for searching

That’s All.
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