What is (View view) in android?

Question

Can anyone please explain why should we use (View view), and what does it mean in Android while defining a method.

public void dosomething(View view) {}

Thanks in advance. I'm a beginner, so my questions might seem basic.

Answer 1

Usually View is used as arguments in methods which act as some kind of listener. For example when you have more than 1 Button in your layout and you set onClickListener on them, you create a method like this:

public void onClick(View view){
}

Here the View is the view on which the user has clicked. So if you have 2 buttons on your layout, you can check which one the user has clicked by using the following code:

public void onClick(View view){
  switch(view.getId()){
    case R.id.button1: //do something here
       break;
    case R.id.button2: //do sonething else here
       break;
   }
}

Hence, View is supplied as an argument when the method is for a listener and the view(Button,Spinner,Switch,etc.) is used to distinguish which view on the layout has been clicked/selected.