How to add same view to parent multiple times by inflating it only once

Question

I have a LinearLayout with vertical orientation as parent, I want to add some view programmatically multiple times to this parent. Right now I am inflating the child every time getting new references to every UI element before adding to parent. This doesn't seem to be very efficient, is there any better way of doing this.

Current code I am using is below, If I inflate only once before for loop I get runtime error "he specified child already has a parent. You must call removeView() on the child's parent first."

        LayoutInflater inflator = LayoutInflater.from(getBaseContext());
        LinearLayout parentPanel = findViewById(R.id.parent_pannel);

        ArrayList<String> myList = getData();
        for(String data : myList) {
            // inflate child
            View item = inflator.inflate(R.layout.list_item, null);
            // initialize review UI
            TextView dataText = (TextView) item.findViewById(R.id.data);
            // set data
            dataText.setText(data);
            // add child
            parentPanel.addView(item);
        }

Answer 1

Did you actually check if inflate is slow? As far as I know, inflating view is very fast (almost as fast as creating views manually).

It might be surprising for you to hear but inflate in fact does not parse the XMLs at all. XMLs for layout are parsed and pre-processed at compile time - they are stored in a binary form which makes view inflation very efficient (that's why you cannot inflate a view from an XML generated at runtime).