Overriding View.onSaveInstanceState() and View.onRestoreInstanceState() using View.BaseSavedState?

Question

Assume you want to derive your own View class from an existing View implementation, adding a bit of value, hence maintaining a few variables which represent your View's state in a meaningful way.

It would be nice if your View would save its state automatically just like others do (if an ID is assigned) so you would want to override onRestoreInstanceState() and onSaveInstanceState().

Of course, you need to call the respective methods of your base class, and you need to combine your state information with that of your base class.

Obviously, the only safe way to do so is to wrap your super class' Parcelable in an own Parcelable such that the keys won't get mixed up.

Now there's View.BaseSavedState and its interesting getSuperState() method but I somehow fail to understand how this really adds value to just storing the base class' Parcelable in a Bundle along with the derived View's state values and return that. On the other hand, maybe some other system component will expect all InstanceState information to be of type View.AbsSavedState (e.g. such that getSuperState() can be called)?

Any experiences you're willing to share?

Answer 1

I think the design needs us, and as the name implies, to implement a subclass of View.BaseSavedState to store values by overriding Parcelable's interface.

TextView.SavedState is a good example

public static class SavedState extends BaseSavedState {
    int selStart;
    int selEnd;
    CharSequence text;
    boolean frozenWithFocus;
    CharSequence error;

    SavedState(Parcelable superState) {
        super(superState);
    }

    @Override
    public void writeToParcel(Parcel out, int flags) {
        super.writeToParcel(out, flags);
        out.writeInt(selStart);
        out.writeInt(selEnd);
        out.writeInt(frozenWithFocus ? 1 : 0);
        TextUtils.writeToParcel(text, out, flags);

        if (error == null) {
            out.writeInt(0);
        } else {
            out.writeInt(1);
            TextUtils.writeToParcel(error, out, flags);
        }
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        String str = "TextView.SavedState{"
                + Integer.toHexString(System.identityHashCode(this))
                + " start=" + selStart + " end=" + selEnd;
        if (text != null) {
            str += " text=" + text;
        }
        return str + "}";
    }

    @SuppressWarnings("hiding")
    public static final Parcelable.Creator<SavedState> CREATOR
            = new Parcelable.Creator<SavedState>() {
        public SavedState createFromParcel(Parcel in) {
            return new SavedState(in);
        }

        public SavedState[] newArray(int size) {
            return new SavedState[size];
        }
    };

    private SavedState(Parcel in) {
        super(in);
        selStart = in.readInt();
        selEnd = in.readInt();
        frozenWithFocus = (in.readInt() != 0);
        text = TextUtils.CHAR_SEQUENCE_CREATOR.createFromParcel(in);

        if (in.readInt() != 0) {
            error = TextUtils.CHAR_SEQUENCE_CREATOR.createFromParcel(in);
        }
    }
}