Experience - Android Drag and Drop List

I am continually surprised by the fact that the things I need for my application do not exist in android. This time I needed a drag and drop list. I have been unsuccessful in finding a simple, working drag and drop list that I can extend. I have seen numerous places that reference android's music app as a starting place. The main classes of importance from the music app were TouchInterceptor and TrackBrowserActivity. Many of the examples that I have seen struggled to use it well and most ended up having serious problems as a result. I would rate the TouchInterceptor code with a rating of "F" because it is not simple and it is not easily extendable. Check out this article for a way to rate code. It left a good impression on me.

This experience is about my efforts to build a simplified drag and drop list. I hope time will prove that it is easy to extend as well. The first task was to get a copy of TouchInterceptor and TrackBrowserActivity running in a simplified project. This took time because of all the dependencies and interconnections between these two classes and the rest of the app. As I look back on the matter the only real benefit this provided me with was a better understanding of how not to make TouchInterceptor work. After I had a runnable project, I attempted to modify the drag animation from an expanding/contracting items on drag to one that rearranged items in place. I was almost finished with this change when I ran into a technical issue that I didn't want to spend time to fix. I then discovered that the Launcher app provided a better drag and drop example because it was simplified compared to some of the complex interactions in the music app. Using both the music app and the launcher app as a reference I wrote a simplified drag and drop project. You can find the project here.

I wanted to provide methods that allowed modifying/customizing the view of the item being dragged, but not fall into the same complex interactions of the music app. I chose to use the DragListener with the intended purpose of handling view changes. In the sample project, I made the item's view invisible to show where the drag view came from, and I changed the background color to show that a drag view is different from the rest of the item views. It is important to revert any changes to the item view because it will be recycled back into the list view for item views.

This project code is simply to share a simple working drag and drop list since I was unable to find one elsewhere on the web. If you add any extensions to this simple project I would like to hear about it in the comments.