findViewByID returns null

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First of all: yes, I read all the other threads on this topic. And not only those from this site… (you see, I’m a little frustrated)

Most of them come with the advice to use android:id instead of just id in the XML file. I did.

From others, I learned, that View.findViewById works different than Activity.findViewById. I handled that, too.

In my location_layout.xml, I use:

<FrameLayout .... >
    <some.package.MyCustomView ... />

    <LinearLayout ... >
        <TextView ...
            android:id="@+id/txtLat" />
        ...
    </LinearLayout>
</FrameLayout>

In my Activity I do:

...
setContentView( R.layout.location_layout );

and in my custom view class:

... 
TextView tv = (TextView) findViewById( R.id.txtLat );

which returns null. Doing this, my Activity works fine. So maybe it’s because of the Activity.findViewById and View.findViewById differences. So I stored the context passed to the customs view constructor locally and tried:

...
TextView tv = (TextView) ((Activity) context).findViewById( R.id.txtLat );

which also returned null.

Then, I changed my custom view to extend ViewGroup instead View and changed the location_layout.xml to let the TextView be a direct child of my custom view, so that the View.findViewById should work as supposed. Suprise: it didn’t solve anything.

So what the heck am I doing wrong?

I’ll appreciate any comments.

31 Answers
31

which returns null

Possibly because you are calling it too early. Wait until onFinishInflate(). Here is a sample project demonstrating a custom View accessing its contents.

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