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My custom SurfaceView is null after findViewById() [duplicate]

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.

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.

Possibly, you are calling findViewById before calling setContentView?
If that's the case, try calling findViewById AFTER calling setContentView

Make sure you don't have multiple versions of your layout for different screen densities. I ran into this problem once when adding a new id to an existing layout but forgot to update the hdpi version. If you forget to update all versions of the layout file it will work for some screen densities but not others.

FindViewById can be null if you call the wrong super constructor in a custom view. The ID tag is part of attrs, so if you ignore attrs, you delete the ID.
This would be wrong
public CameraSurfaceView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
super(context);
}
This is correct
public CameraSurfaceView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
super(context,attrs);
}

Alongside the classic causes, mentioned elsewhere:
Make sure you've called setContentView() before findViewById()
Make sure that the id you want is in the view or layout you've given to setContentView()
Make sure that the id isn't accidentally duplicated in different layouts
There is one I have found for custom views in standard layouts, which goes against the documentation:
In theory you can create a custom view and add it to a layout (see here). However, I have found that in such situations, sometimes the id attribute works for all the views in the layout except the custom ones. The solution I use is:
Replace each custom view with a FrameLayout with the same layout properties as you would like the custom view to have. Give it an appropriate id, say frame_for_custom_view.
In onCreate:
setContentView(R.layout.my_layout);
FrameView fv = findViewById(R.id.frame_for_custom_layout);
MyCustomView cv = new MyCustomView(context);
fv.addView(cv);
which puts the custom view in the frame.

In my case, I had 2 activites in my project, main.xml and main2.xml. From the beginning, main2 was a copy of main, and everything worked well, until I added new TextView to main2, so the R.id.textview1 became available for the rest of app. Then I tried to fetch it by standard calling:
TextView tv = (TextView) findViewById( R.id.textview1 );
and it was always null. It turned out, that in onCreate constructor I was instantiating not main2, but the other one. I had:
setContentView(R.layout.main);
instead of
setContentView(R.layout.main2);
I noticed this after I arrived here, on the site.

#Override
protected void onStart() {
// use findViewById() here instead of in onCreate()
}

A answer for those using ExpandableListView and run into this question based on it's title.
I had this error attempting to work with TextViews in my child and group views as part of an ExpandableListView implementation.
You can use something like the following in your implementations of the getChildView() and getGroupView() methods.
if (convertView == null) {
LayoutInflater inflater = (LayoutInflater) myContext.getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
convertView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.child_layout, null);
}
I found this here.

FWIW, I don't see that anyone solved this in quite the same way as I needed to. No complaints at compile time, but I was getting a null view at runtime, and calling things in the proper order. That is,
findViewById()
after
setContentView().
The problem turned out that my view is defined in content_main.xml, but in my activity_main.xml, I lacked this one statement:
<include layout="#layout/content_main" />
When I added that to activity_main.xml, no more NullPointer.

I'm pretty new to Android/Eclipse, by mistake I added the UI stuff to activity_main.xml instead of fragment_main.xml. Took me some hours to figure that out...

I had this same problem. I was using a third-party library that allows you to override their adapter for a GridView and to specify your own layout for each GridView cell.
I finally realized what was happening. Eclipse was still using the library's layout xml file for each cell in the GridView, even though it gave no indication of this. In my custom adapter, it indicated that it was using the xml resource from my own project even though at runtime, it wasn't.
So what I did was to make sure my custom xml layouts and ids were different from those still sitting in the library, cleaned the project and then it started reading the correct custom layouts that were in my project.
In short, be careful if you're overriding a third-party library's adapter and specifying your own layout xml for the adapter to use. If your layout inside your project has the same file name as that in the library, you might encounter a really difficult-to-find bug!

In my particular case, I was trying to add a footer to a ListView. The following call in onCreate() was returning null.
TextView footerView = (TextView) placesListView.findViewById(R.id.footer);
Changing this to inflate the footer view instead of finding it by ID solved this issue.
View footerView = ((LayoutInflater) getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE)).inflate(R.layout.footer_view, null, false);

Just wanted to throw my specific case in here. Might help someone down the line.
I was using the directive in my Android UI XML like this:
Parent view:
<FrameLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:tag="home_phone"
android:background="#color/colorPrimary">
...
<include
layout="#layout/retry_button"
android:visibility="gone" />
Child view (retry_button):
<com.foo.RetryButton
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:id="#+id/retry"
android:layout_gravity="center"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="100dp"
android:layout_height="140dp">
.findViewById(R.id.retry) would always return null. But, if I moved the ID from the child view into the include tag, it started working.
Fixed parent:
<FrameLayout
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:tag="home_phone"
android:background="#color/colorPrimary">
...
<include
layout="#layout/retry_button"
android:id="#+id/retry"
android:visibility="gone" />
Fixed child:
<com.foo.RetryButton
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_gravity="center"
android:orientation="vertical"
android:layout_width="100dp"
android:layout_height="140dp">

In my case, I was using ExpandableListView and I had set android:transcriptMode="normal". This was causing few children in expandable group to disappear and I used to get NULL exception when ever I used scroll the list.

For me I had two xml layouts for the same activity - one in portrait mode and one in landscape. Of course I had changed the id of an object in the landscape xml but had forgotten to make the same change in the portrait version. Make sure if you change one you do the same to the other xml or you will not get an error until you run/debug it and it can't find the id you didn't change. Oh dumb mistakes, why must you punish me so?

Set the activity content from a layout resource.
ie.,setContentView(R.layout.basicXml);

In addition of the above solutions you make sure the
tools:context=".TakeMultipleImages"
in the layout is same value in the mainfest.xml file :
android:name=".TakeMultipleImages" for the same activity element.
it is occur when use copy and paste to create new activity

I have the same problem, but I think its worth sharing with you guys.
If you have to findViewById in custom layout, for example:
public class MiniPlayerControllBar extends LinearLayout {
//code
}
you cannot get the view in constructor.
You should call findViewById after view has inflated.
Their is a method you can override onFinishInflate

My case is none like above, no solutions worked. I assume my view was too deep into layout hierarchy. I moved it one level up and it was not null anymore.

INFLATE THE LAYOUT !! (which contains the id)
In my case findViewById() returned null, because the layout in which the element was written, was not inflated...
Eg.
fragment_layout.xml
<ListView
android:id="#+id/listview">
findViewById(R.id.listview) returned null, because I had not done
inflater.inflate(R.layout.fragment_layout, ..., ...);
before it.
Hope this answer helps some of y'all.

In my case I had inflated the layout but the child views were returning null. Originally I had this:
#Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_history);
footerView = ((LayoutInflater) getApplicationContext().getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE)).inflate(R.layout.listview_footer, null, false);
pbSpinner = (ProgressBar) findViewById(R.id.pbListviewFooter);
tvText = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.tvListviewFooter);
...
}
However, when I changed it to the following it worked:
#Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_history);
footerView = ((LayoutInflater) getApplicationContext().getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE)).inflate(R.layout.listview_footer, null, false);
pbSpinner = (ProgressBar) footerView.findViewById(R.id.pbListviewFooter);
tvText = (TextView) footerView.findViewById(R.id.tvListviewFooter);
...
}
The key was to specifically reference the already inflated layout in order to get the child views. That is, to add footerView:
footerView.findViewById...

It crashed for me because one of fields in my activity id was matching with id in an other activity. I fixed it by giving a unique id.
In my loginActivity.xml password field id was "password". In my registration activity I just fixed it by giving id r_password, then it returned not null object:
password = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.r_password);

In my experience, it seems that this can also happen when your code is called after OnDestroyView (when the fragment is on the back stack.) If you are updating the UI on input from a BroadCastReceiver, you ought to check if this is the case.

findViewById also can return null if you're inside a Fragment. As described here: findViewById in Fragment
You should call getView() to return the top level View inside a Fragment. Then you can find the layout items (buttons, textviews, etc)

In my case, findViewById returned null when I moved the call from a parent object into an adapter object instantiated by the parent. After trying tricks listed here without success, I moved the findViewById back into the parent object and passed the result as a parameter during instantiation of the adapter object.
For example, I did this in parent object:
Spinner hdSpinner = (Spinner)view.findViewById(R.id.accountsSpinner);
Then I passed the hdSpinner as a parameter during creation of the adapter object:
mTransactionAdapter = new TransactionAdapter(getActivity(),
R.layout.transactions_list_item, null, from, to, 0, hdSpinner);

I was facing a similar problem when I was trying to do a custom view for a ListView.
I solved it simply by doing this:
public View getView(int i, View view, ViewGroup viewGroup) {
// Gets the inflater
LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(this.contexto);
// Inflates the layout
ConstraintLayout cl2 = (ConstraintLayout)
inflater.inflate(R.layout.custom_list_view, viewGroup, false);
//Insted of calling just findViewById, I call de cl2.findViewById method. cl2 is the layout I have just inflated.
TextView tv1 = (TextView)cl2.findViewById(cl2);

Ways to debug and find the issue:
Comment out all findViewById in your activity.
Comment out everything except onCreate and setContentView
Run the project and see if any layout is set
In my case, I was using activity_main.xml in both my app module and also my library module. So when I performed the above steps, instead of the layout which I designed in the library, the layout inside app module was inflated.
So I changed the activity_main.xml file name to activity_main_lib.xml.
So make sure you do not have any duplicate layout names in your whole project.

The issue for me was that I had two layouts with the same file name activity_main.xml. (The layouts were in different libraries but in the same app) The issue was solved by renaming one of them to a unique name.

For me it returned null because the given control was (programmatically) hidden. When I put a condition to call findViewByID(id) only when the control is visible, it started working again.

For me it was only null when using Evaluate Expression or the Debug Watch View of the IDE.

Changing image source of an imageview in a different layout

I can't find a solution to this anywhere, I'm still quite new to programming so it might be a simple question.
In my MainActivity I take the position of a ViewPager. According to this position I want to change the source of an ImageView which is placed in a layout that will inflate in a service. But with my code I keep getting a NullPointerException.
Do I need to declare the ImageView differently because it's in a different layout than the currently showed one?
public void OnClick(View view) {
pagenumber = viewPager.getCurrentItem();
imageView = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.filterview);
switch (pagenumber){
case 0: imageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.goghfilter);
break;
case 1: imageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.background3);
break;
Thanks for any help!

Well remember that the class inflated with the layout will only find views in that layout, try to findById a view not in that layout will cause errors.
To resolve this, define a custom layout inflater, inflate the layout with the image , then used that view inflated and perform a findById on it.

Try This:
ImageView mImageView = (ImageView) MainActivity.this.getLayoutInflater().inflate(R.layout.layout,null).findViewById(R.id.imageView);
mImageView.setImageResource(R.drawable.icon);

Cannot Programmatically Set EditText ID

I am creating a dynamic number of editTexts and want to eventually pull the ID for each to call .getText() on the editText.
However, I noticed that it is difficult to programmatically set the ID, so I am using the .setTag() method instead:
private void createAnswerChoice(int answerNumber) {
ViewGroup layout = (ViewGroup) mRootView.findViewById(R.id.create_poll_questions_answer_layout);
EditText editText = new EditText(getActivity());
editText.setHint(getResources().getString(R.string.answer_text) + " " + answerNumber);
editText.setSingleLine(true);
editText.setImeOptions(EditorInfo.IME_ACTION_DONE);
String editTextID = ((getResources().getString(R.string.created_answer_editText_id))+String.valueOf(answerNumber));
editText.setTag(editTextID);
Toast.makeText(getActivity().getApplicationContext(), editTextID, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
LinearLayout.LayoutParams layoutParams = new LinearLayout.LayoutParams(ViewGroup.LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT, ViewGroup.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT);
editText.setLayoutParams(layoutParams);
TextInputLayout newAnswer = new TextInputLayout(getActivity());
newAnswer.setLayoutParams(new ViewGroup.LayoutParams(ViewGroup.LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT, ViewGroup.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT));
newAnswer.addView(editText, layoutParams);
layout.addView(newAnswer);
}
How would I get the value of each editText if I know the tag and not the ID? Also, what is the purpose of the .setTag() method (how does it relate to .setID()?)

create resource file(id.xml) in res/values/id.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<item
type="id"
name="edittext_hello" />
</resources>
and then set,
editText.setId(R.id.edittext_hello);

findViewById() and findViewWithTag() are methods intended to obtain a reference to a View that was inflated from XML.
If you are creating the Views, you have them already then there's no need to use those methods. Keep the reference to the View somewhere.

I do not recommend using tags to get views from your hierarchy but if you must this SO post describes how to do it: https://stackoverflow.com/a/16262479/6526330.
Tags should be used when you need to cache some data in a view to grab out later when you have the view again (yes I know very generic). Some examples would be if you are using a holder in a list view or if you have a lot of views on a screen and want a global click listener vs listeners for each view. I stole both of these examples from the answers on this post which do a hell of a better job at describing the use cases than I can.

Is it possible to modify xml in java programatically. specifically layout_alignBottom, layout_alignLeft and layout_alignStart

A few ImageViews have been already created in xml
eg:
<ImageView
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:id="#+id/blue_dot1"
android:src="#drawable/checkers_blue1"
android:layout_alignBottom="#+id/y1"
android:layout_alignLeft="#+id/x1"
android:layout_alignStart="#+id/x1"/>
Is it possible to update the xml later on programatically in Java for the alignbottom, left and start variables (so that the blue_dot1 image can be moved along the x/y grid of images)
For example I am going to make a method which has a X and Y arg to allow movement in a simple grid, its just the xml part i cant figure out.

yes this is very much possible. but you are not modifying the XML instead you are modifying properties of a specific view:
check this question
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = (RelativeLayout.LayoutParams)button.getLayoutParams();
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.ALIGN_PARENT_RIGHT);
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.LEFT_OF, R.id.id_to_be_left_of);
button.setLayoutParams(params); //causes layout update

You can not change the xml-file. But you can set LayoutParams of your view programatically.
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = (RelativeLayout.LayoutParams)button.getLayoutParams();
params.removeRule(RelativeLayout.ALIGN_BOTTOM);

No, modifying the XML is not possible to do from Java code. However, you can modify the Views layout properties programatically even after the XML properties have been declared and the view has been drawn. Its fairly simple to do. You just get a reference to that image view:
ImageView myImg = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.myImg);
myImg.setLayoutParams([Your params here]);

How to set android view's layout_alignParentEnd property by code?

How can I set the alignParentEnd property programmatically?
I searched all over the Android Developer website, but I couldn't find any reference to setting properties like alignParentEnd in code. It is only explained how to set them in XML. Where could I find documentation for something like this in the future?

LayoutParams are used to set layout properties in code. alignParentEnd is a property of RelativeLayout so you have to use RelativeLayout.LayoutParams. You can find the documentation here.
So to set the property in code you can use the addRule() method of the RelativeLayout.LayoutParams. For example you can do this:
// Create the LayoutParams
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, RelativeLayout.LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT);
// Add all the rules you need
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.ALIGN_PARENT_END);
...
// Once you are done set the LayoutParams to the layout
relativeLayout.setLayoutParams(params);
You can find a list of all rules which you can set with addRule() here.

Parameter are added in View and ViewGroup using LayoutParam.
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = (RelativeLayout.LayoutParams) my_child_view.getLayoutParams();
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.ALIGN_PARENT_END);
my_child_view.setLayoutParams(params);