Beginning Android 2

Chapter 5

Employing Basic Widgets

Every GUI toolkit has some basic widgets: fields, labels, buttons, and so on. Android's toolkit is no different in scope, and the basic widgets will provide a good introduction to how widgets work in Android activities.

Assigning Labels

The simplest widget is the label, referred to in Android as a TextView. As in most GUI toolkits, labels are bits of text that cannot be edited directly by users. Typically, they are used to identify adjacent widgets (e.g., a “Name:” label next to a field where you fill in a name).

In Java, you can create a label by creating a TextView instance. More commonly, though, you will create labels in XML layout files by adding a TextView element to the layout, with an android:text property ...