Redraw a single row in a listview

Question

Is it possible to redraw a single row in a ListView? I have a ListView with rows that are LinearLayouts. I listen to a preference change and sometimes I need to change just one View inside the LinearLayout of a single row. Is there a way to make it redraw that row without calling listview.notifyDatasetChanged()?

I've tried calling view.invalidate() on the view (inside the LinearLayout) but it doesn't redraw the row.

Answer 1

As Romain Guy explained a while back during the Google I/O session, the most efficient way to only update one view in a list view is something like the following (this one update the whole View data):

ListView list = getListView();
int start = list.getFirstVisiblePosition();
for(int i=start, j=list.getLastVisiblePosition();i<=j;i++)
    if(target==list.getItemAtPosition(i)){
        View view = list.getChildAt(i-start);
        list.getAdapter().getView(i, view, list);
        break;
    }

Assuming target is one item of the adapter.

This code retrieve the ListView, then browse the currently shown views, compare the target item you are looking for with each displayed view items, and if your target is among those, get the enclosing view and execute the adapter getView() on that view to refresh the display.

As a side note invalidate() doesn't work like some people expect and will not refresh the view like getView() does, notifyDataSetChanged() will rebuild the whole list and end up calling getview() for every displayed items and invalidateViews() will also affect a bunch.

One last thing, one can also get extra performance if he only needs to change a child of a row view and not the whole row like getView does. In that case, the following code can replace list.getAdapter().getView(i, view, list); (example to change a TextView text):

((TextView)view.findViewById(R.id.myid)).setText("some new text");

In code we trust.