MinimalBible.github.io/_posts/2014-05-23-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-listview-caching.md

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post	More than you ever wanted to know about ListView caching	2014-05-23 19:05:13 -0400	listview viewholder holderview caching	feature credit creditlink

More than you ever wanted to know about ListView caching

Unless you wanted to know a lot

So, I ran into some interesting issues with ListView caching in trying to get everything implemented. I'm going to document them here, because I imagine I'm not the only one to struggle with these, and it could save people a lot of time and frustration later. Hope this is helpful!

Why does HolderView work anyway?

One of the first questions I had about HolderView was why it actually worked. I mean, if classes are not static any more, they're being garbage collected when they go out of scope. And if they're being garbage collected, I'll have to keep on re-creating them, and I'm back to having the issues the [ViewHolder and HolderView]{% post_url 2014-05-23-viewholder-vs-holderview %} were designed to solve in the first place.

Well, to understand why HolderView works you need to know a bit about how the ListView operates in the backend. Long story short, when you scroll through elements, the ListView recycles things from the top of the screen down to the bottom. Think of it like a climbing wall treadmill. This way, you don't have to store every single element of the list, and you don't have to create them either.

So, the getView() method is where the actual view inflation of a ListView happens. The ListView supplies us with one of the Views it's already had created for us, so we can get right to work. Now, the ListView will display whatever we return from getView(). So there's nothing against us returning a completely different view, unrelated to the one the ListView gave us originally. And that's why this works.

Because the HolderView returns it's own custom View object, rather than using the View that the ListView gave us, we can guarantee attributes like the bind() method will actually exist when cast to/from View/ItemView. This way, when the views are recycled by the ListView, it's actually giving us the custom HolderView views, rather than generic views. All we have to do is re-bind() the HolderView, and we're good to go. Fancy, no?

Switching to ViewHolder from HolderView

Now, let's say that for whatever reason, you want to switch to a ViewHolder pattern from a HolderView. Not too challenging, but make sure you're thorough about it. When I tried to do this I wasn't so thorough, and so instead of caching only references to the ViewHolder, I just cached the HolderView instead. It led to the same bugs I was seeing prior to the switch (of course) and so I was a bit frustrated. I also started getting some NullPointerException errors, which was really strange. Understanding these errors is incredibly technical, so stick with me.

Part of the reason for using HolderView at all is memory management. The standard ViewHolder pattern uses static classes, meaning they just stay in memory until the actual application is killed. The standard HolderView is not a static class, which means that when it goes out of scope, it is destroyed.

Well, in the implementation linked to above, I stored the HolderView object into the cache in a kind of hybrid approach. I kept the memory management of HolderView while using the getTag() style of ViewHolder caching. And to be honest, it wasn't until trying to write this post (4 days after the fact) that I understand why it was broken. Since the HolderView gets destroyed when it goes out of scope (for example, when you scroll past the view), the tag of the View will be null when you scroll anywhere. Thus, I had to modify the code so that I check both the view and tag, rather than just the view:

BookListAdapter.java {% highlight java %} // Note that convertView==null will short-circuit the getTag() check if (convertView == null || convertView.getTag() == null) {% endhighlight %}

View recycling leaves views partially initialized -------------------------------------------------

Now, this last piece is a very nasty issue I had seen ever since adding the initial ProgressWheel (took 3 days to get it fixed). What was happening was that when I showed the ProgressWheel, individual rows in the ListView would have the wheel displayed when I had never clicked them!

Well, there wasn't ever really an a-HA! moment in trying to fix this, but by the time I had understood enough of how the ListView actually works to debug some of the issues above, this one started to make sense.

What happens is that the views get re-cycled when you scroll down, but the bind method never explicitly set the state, or inflated the layout. Thus, the view that was given already had the ProgressWheel showing even if the item hadn't actually clicked on it. After the fix above, everything started working again.

I hope that answers any questions you may have about the ListView. I think the component is challenging to use, and if you don't really understand the optimizations it does, things get very strange and confusing very quickly. But now you know enough of how everything is laid out in memory to be efficient yourself! Go forward and write great code!