Android™ How to Program, Second Edition

J.5.3. Views into Collections and Arrays Method asList

An important feature of the collections framework is the ability to manipulate the elements of one collection type (such as a set) through a different collection type (such as a list), regardless of the collection’s internal implementation. The set of public methods through which collections are manipulated is called a view.

Class Arrays provides static method asList to view an array (sometimes called the backing array) as a List collection. A List view allows you to manipulate the array as if it were a list. This is useful for adding the elements in an array to a collection and for sorting array elements. The next example demonstrates how to create a LinkedList with a List view of an array, ...