Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

For the More Curious: include and merge

Earlier in the chapter you used the include tag to include a row of RemoteButtons multiple times (into the same layout). It works in the obvious way:

    <include layout="@layout/some_partial_layout"/>

The above include will include the contents of the layout file whose resource ID is @layout/some_partial_layout.

You can use include to reduce duplication in a single layout, as you did earlier in this chapter, or you can use it to reduce duplication between layouts. If you have some chunk of a layout that occurs in two or more layouts, you can just create that chunk as a layout and include it wherever it is needed. Then when you need to update it, you only have to do it in a single place.

There are two more ...