Android: Drawing a canvas to an ImageView

Question

I'm new to android programming and what I'm trying to figure out is this;

In my layout i have a TextView, ImageView, and Button, all on a vertically oriented LinearLayout.

I want to be able to dynamically draw circles in the ImageView, without disturbing the rest of my layout(textview/button). I'm trying to create a canvas, and use the drawcircle function within canvas to set the location of the circle. And then draw that canvas to my imageview in some way. I cannot get this to work, is there a trick to this? Or is my method fundamentally wrong? How would i go about drawing circles to the ImageView without recreating my entire layout?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the same challenge and came to the conclusion that overwriting onDraw will at least in the general case not work. My blog explains the reasons. What worked very well for me is the following:

1. Create a new image bitmap and attach a brand new canvas to it.
2. Draw the image bitmap into the canvas.
3. Draw everything else you want into the canvas.
4. Attach the canvas to the ImageView.

Here is a code snippet for this:

import android.graphics.Bitmap;
import android.graphics.Canvas;
import android.graphics.Paint;
import android.graphics.RectF;
import android.graphics.drawable.BitmapDrawable;

ImageView myImageView = ...
Bitmap myBitmap = ...
Paint myRectPaint = ...
int x1 = ...
int y1 = ...
int x2 = ...
int y2 = ...

//Create a new image bitmap and attach a brand new canvas to it
Bitmap tempBitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(myBitmap.getWidth(), myBitmap.getHeight(), Bitmap.Config.RGB_565);
Canvas tempCanvas = new Canvas(tempBitmap);

//Draw the image bitmap into the cavas
tempCanvas.drawBitmap(myBitmap, 0, 0, null);

//Draw everything else you want into the canvas, in this example a rectangle with rounded edges
tempCanvas.drawRoundRect(new RectF(x1,y1,x2,y2), 2, 2, myPaint);

//Attach the canvas to the ImageView
myImageView.setImageDrawable(new BitmapDrawable(getResources(), tempBitmap));