Load images through RemoteViews in widget

[pavlospt]

Is there any chance that this feature request would be implemented in a next release?

I have searched but did not find anything about RemoteViews and Glide.

[sjudd]

The odds of this feature making it in are definitely higher if you implement it and put up a pull request! :).

You're correct however that Glide doesn't currently offer an API specifically for RemoteViews. Take a look at SimpleTarget. You can implement obtaining the size of the RemoteView and setting your Bitmap or Drawable result relatively easily. If your solution seems generally, please do consider putting it up as a pull request. I'm happy to answer more questions if you have any trouble.

[pavlospt]

Sure will do it when i get some free time! I hope to make a pull request asap! Thank you for the response!

[pavlospt]

Actually as i am searching for ways to do this i can't seem to find a way to get a height and width of a RemoteView, so i will just try it on the blind for the moment and report back!

[TWiStErRob]

There's no way to get anything back from the RemoteViews. You can only operate on things you know (i.e. hardcoded in the layout XML).
You can't even get how many dps your 1x1 widget is, it doesn't just differ by device it differs by installed launcher app.

RemoteViews is just a list of things to set on remote Views. Essentially a Map<int:viewId, Map<Method:setter, Object:value>>. You can't store state in a widget and can't call getters because the above mentioned map is applied to a View via findViewById-ing the views and then calling reflective methods (in an other process). Every time you update the widget you're reinflating the layout as far as I know, but I didn't test that. You may have to delay updating the widget to when the images is available to prevent clearing texts and colours you may have set.

So at best the generic solution would involve a call to override or equivalent to let Glide know of view size. There's a limitation too, a RemoteViews can only store screeSize*2 pixels in Bitmaps so you should use the smallest possible size if you have multiple images. Glide's defaulting to screen size is not a good idea here.

I learned all of the above while I was trying to make text the biggest possible without a linebreak and while it's "trivial" in a normal layout, it is impossible in widgets: you don't have any clue about widget size nor TextView size, not to mention sps (i.e. the user can break your pixel perfect widget layout with a simple setting change) so I started using dp as font size for widgets.

I would be happiest to be proven wrong though, good luck with widgets!

[pavlospt]

@TWiStErRob Υes, that's why at the moment i am not going to deal with ImageView's size and use something built-in from Glide! I have written a new custom class extending BaseTarget but dealing with RemoteViews. Though I need to test it because it's only a theory for the moment and code in paper.

[pavlospt]

UPDATE: Actually i managed to implement it and it works pretty fine! The only drawback though is that the user has to arbitrary set the size because of the limitations that RemoteViews are having as explained by @TWiStErRob. Will make a pull request ASAP, need to document the usage and make some samples!

[TWiStErRob]

#248 has been merged and closed.