Android ListView – Fixing Missing/Blank Dividers

A post with code in it. Because it’s been a long time since the last one.

If you work with ListViews in Android, as all Android developers will do at some point, you may notice that if you set your list items to be non-selectable the dividers that are drawn between each cell disappear. In the Holo Light theme you would normally get a thin light grey dividing line between cells. Depending on how you’ve implemented your adapter, you may find that these dividers become white/transparent when the cells are not selectable. According to Android framework engineer Romain Guy, this is the intended behaviour.

As Haythem Souissi points out in this Stack Overflow answer, you can work around this by ensuring that the areAllItemsEnabled method returns true, even though all items are not enabled (maybe none of them are). The isEnabled method will take care of actually disabling the cells and the dividers will be drawn between each of them.

All very straightforward so far but it all goes wrong again when you try to add a non-selectable header view to the list. The way that ListView deals with headers and footers is that it creates its own adapter to wrap/decorate yours and insert the header/footer views in the appropriate places. This is fine but it’s not delegating the areAllItemsEnabled method, so our above fix no longer works.

Fortunately, and unusually for Android, everything we need to resolve this issue is part of the public API. The adapter decorator class is android.widget.HeaderViewListAdapter. We just need to create our own instance, wrapping our own adapter, and override areAllItemsEnabled as above. There’s a slight complication in that we have to wrap the header view in an instance of ListView.FixedViewInfo and this is a non-static inner class of ListView, but we can reach into our bag of obscure Java tricks to create an instance from outside the enclosing class.

// I assume you know how get a reference to the ListView and create your own adapter.
ListView listView = (ListView) view.findViewById(android.R.id.list);
CustomAdapter adapter = new CustomAdapter(context, listOfItems);

// You can create any view you like for the header.
TextView listHeader = (TextView) inflater.inflate(R.layout.list_header, null);
listHeader.setText("My Header Text");

// This is how you create an instance of the non-static nested class, providing
// it with a reference to an instance of the containing class (ListView).
ListView.FixedViewInfo headerInfo = listView.new FixedViewInfo();

headerInfo.view = listHeader;
headerInfo.isSelectable = false;

// HeaderViewListAdapter insists on concrete ArrayLists.
ArrayList headers = new ArrayList(1);
headerInfoList.add(headerInfo);
ArrayList footers = new ArrayList(0);

HeaderViewListAdapter wrapper = new HeaderViewListAdapter(headers, footers, adapter)
{
    @Override
    public boolean areAllItemsEnabled()
    {
        return true;
    }
};
listView.setAdapter(wrapper);