Building Android UIs with Custom Views

Reacting to touch events

In order to make our custom view interactive, one of the first things we will implement is to process and react to touch events, or basically, when the user touches or drags on top of our custom view.

Android provides us with the onTouchEvent() method that we can override in our custom view. By overriding this method, we'll get any touch event happening on top of it. To see how it works, let's add it to the custom view we built in the last chapter:

@Override 
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) { 
    Log.d(TAG, "touch: " + event); 
    return super.onTouchEvent(event); 
} 

Lets also add a log call to see the events we receive. If we run this code and touch on top of our view, we'll get the following:

D/com.packt.rrafols.customview.CircularActivityIndicator: ...