Giving Users Choices Using Spinner Controls

Sometimes you want to limit the choices available for users to type. For instance, if users are going to enter the name of a state, you might as well limit them to only the valid states because this is a known set. Although you could do this by letting them type something and then blocking invalid entries, you can also provide similar functionality with a Spinner control. As with the auto-complete method, the possible choices for a spinner can come from an Adapter. You can also set the available choices in the layout definition by using the entries attribute with an array resource (specifically a string-array that is referenced as something such as @array/state-list). The Spinner control isn’t actually an EditText; although, it is frequently used in a similar fashion. Following is an example of the XML layout definition for a Spinner control for choosing a color: