Sometimes you need to intercept touches for a given ViewGroup, to temporarily change or disable it’s behavior. For example, recently I had to do this to temporarily intercept events for a RecyclerView during a tutorial, instructing the user how to select a particular item.
In this case, I could simply add an overlaid Layout on top of everything, but to keep as close to the real thing as possible, I decided to intercept the touch events at the RecyclerView level. The problem is, how to detect if the touch event needs to be intercepted or not. Two possible solutions came to my mind:
- Intercept (or somehow disable) the events on each individual item, except on the one we’re interested on receiving it. For me it’s a bit messy to have this logic scattered.
- Intercept the events on the
RecyclerView, and check if the event belongs to the child, to allow further processing.
So, I decided to go for the second solution. To do that, I investigated a bit more in depth how touch events are handled in Android. This a really interesting article on how this happens: Understanding Android Input Touch Events System Framework (dispatchTouchEvent, onInterceptTouchEvent, onTouchEvent, OnTouchListener.onTouch) (notice original site is no longer available, replacing the link with Internet Archive). Also, it is really useful to see the real code on how a ViewGroup handles this. Even if I could download Android source code from the Android Open Source Project web site, I didn’t really felt like it. So I found this copy online (replaced with Android Code Search).
The interesting part for us is ViewGroup#, and specifically in the loop where it iterates all the child and checks if the touch event is within the bounds of this child.
Based on this, I extracted the relevant code, which boils down to retrieving the hit rectangle of the child we want to allow processing the event, and checking it against the touch target. This class has to be overridden and the getAllowedChildView() method implemented, returning the child we’re interested in allowing the touch events go through.
public class CustomRecyclerView extends RecyclerView {
private static final String LOG_MARKER = CustomRecyclerView.class.getName();
private boolean scrollEnabled = true;
public CustomRecyclerView(Context context) {
super(context);
}
public CustomRecyclerView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
super(context, attrs);
}
public CustomRecyclerView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
super(context, attrs, defStyle);
}
public void setEnabledRecycleScroll(final boolean enable) {
if (scrollEnabled == enable) {
Logger.getInstance().debug(LOG_MARKER, "RecyclerView scrolling is already " +
(enable ? "enabled" : "disabled") + ", skipping");
return;
}
scrollEnabled = enable;
if (!enable) {
Logger.getInstance().debug(LOG_MARKER, "Disabling RecyclerView scrolling");
addOnItemTouchListener(disablerListener); // disables scrolling
} else {
Logger.getInstance().debug(LOG_MARKER, "Enabling RecyclerView scrolling");
removeOnItemTouchListener(disablerListener); // scrolling is enabled again
}
}
// Override this method to return the child we're interested in allowing touch events
// to go through
abstract protected View getAllowedChildView();
private RecyclerView.OnItemTouchListener disablerListener =
new RecyclerView.OnItemTouchListener() {
@Override
public boolean onInterceptTouchEvent(RecyclerView rv, MotionEvent ev) {
// Inspired by ViewGroup#dispatchTouchEvent(MotionEvent). See
// http://codetheory.in/understanding-android-input-touch-events/ and
// http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/frameworks/base/core/java/android/view/ViewGroup.java
final int action = ev.getAction();
if (action == MotionEvent.ACTION_DOWN) {
final float scrolledX = ev.getX() + CustomRecyclerView.this.getScrollX();
final float scrolledY = ev.getY() + CustomRecyclerView.this.getScrollY();
final Rect frame = new Rect();
View allowedChildView = getAllowedChildView();
if (allowedChildView != null) {
allowedChildView.getHitRect(frame);
if (frame.contains((int) scrolledX, (int) scrolledY)) {
// Do not intercept the touch events for this child
return false;
}
}
}
return true;
}
@Override
public void onTouchEvent(RecyclerView rv, MotionEvent e) {
}
};
}