How to implement Android Pull-to-Refresh

Question

In Android applications such as Twitter (official app), when you encounter a ListView, you can pull it down (and it will bounce back when released) to refresh the content.

I wonder what is the best way, in your opinion, to implement that?

Some possibilities I could think of:

1. An item on top of the ListView - however I don't think scrolling back to item position 1 (0-based) with animation on the ListView is an easy task.
2. Another view outside the ListView - but I need to take care of moving the ListView position down when it is pulled, and I'm not sure if we can detect if the drag-touches to the ListView still really scroll the items on the ListView.

Any recommendations?

P.S. I wonder when the official Twitter app source code is released. It has been mentioned that it will be released, but 6 months has passed and we haven't heard about it since then.

Answer 1

Finally, Google released an official version of the pull-to-refresh library!

It is called SwipeRefreshLayout, inside the support library, and the documentation is here:

1. Add SwipeRefreshLayout as a parent of view which will be treated as a pull to refresh the layout. (I took ListView as an example, it can be any View like LinearLayout, ScrollView etc.)

   <android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout
       android:id="@+id/pullToRefresh"
       android:layout_width="match_parent"
       android:layout_height="wrap_content">
       <ListView
           android:id="@+id/listView"
           android:layout_width="match_parent"
           android:layout_height="match_parent"/>
   </android.support.v4.widget.SwipeRefreshLayout>
   

2. Add a listener to your class

   protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
       final SwipeRefreshLayout pullToRefresh = findViewById(R.id.pullToRefresh);
       pullToRefresh.setOnRefreshListener(new SwipeRefreshLayout.OnRefreshListener() {
           @Override
           public void onRefresh() {
               refreshData(); // your code
               pullToRefresh.setRefreshing(false);
           }
       });
   }
   

You can also call pullToRefresh.setRefreshing(true/false); as per your requirement.

UPDATE

Android support libraries have been deprecated and have been replaced by AndroidX. The link to the new library can be found here.

Also, you need to add the following dependency to your project:

implementation 'androidx.swiperefreshlayout:swiperefreshlayout:1.0.0'

OR

You can go to Refactor>>Migrate to AndroidX and Android Studio will handle the dependencies for you.