What is the difference between setContentView and LayoutInflater?
setContentView
is an Activity
method only. Each Activity
is provided with a FrameLayout
with id "@+id/content"
(i.e. the content view). Whatever view you specify in setContentView
will be the view for that Activity
. Note that you can also pass an instance of a view to this method, e.g. setContentView(new WebView(this));
The version of the method that you are using will inflate the view for you behind the scenes.
Fragments, on the other hand, have a lifecycle method called onCreateView
which returns a view (if it has one). The most common way to do this is to inflate a view in XML and return it in this method. In this case you need to inflate it yourself though. Fragments don't have a setContentView
method
Activities and views both have a method called findViewById()
. The activity version will search for a view with the given id inside of it's content view (therefore, internally, it will call contentView.findViewById())
. This means that the contentView needs to be set before it becomes usable. Like setContentView
, fragments don't have a method for findViewById
(which makes sense, because there is no content view). Simply use getView().findViewById()
instead for the same behaviour.
LayoutInflater.inflate
just inflates and returns a view (you can use this anywhere). You still need to set that view as the content view within an Activity