Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

For the More Curious: include and merge

Earlier in the chapter you used the include tag to include a row of RemoteButtons multiple times (into the same layout). It works in the obvious way:

 ​ ​ ​ ​<​i​n​c​l​u​d​e​ ​l​a​y​o​u​t​=​"​@​l​a​y​o​u​t​/​s​o​m​e​_​p​a​r​t​i​a​l​_​l​a​y​o​u​t​"​/​>​

The above include will include the contents of the layout file whose resource ID is @layout/some_partial_layout.

You can use include to reduce duplication in a single layout, as you did earlier in this chapter, or you can use it to reduce duplication between layouts. If you have some chunk of a layout that occurs in two or more layouts, you can just create that chunk as a layout and include it wherever it is needed. Then when you need to update it, you ...