Get the co-ordinates of a touch event on Android

I'm new to Android, I've followed the hello world tutorial through and have a basic idea of what's going on. I'm particularly interested in the touch screen of my T-Mobile Pulse so just to get me started I want to be able to write the co-ordinates of a tocuh event on the screen, so say the user touched the co-ordinate 5,2 - a textview on the screen would display that.

At present I have a simple program that just loads an xml file which contains the textview I intend to write the co-ordinates in.

Thank you in advance, I did Google for help and sea开发者_JS百科rched stackoverflow but everything I found either went way over my head or wasn't suitable for this. Cheers.

You can use this function : http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View.html#setOnTouchListener(android.view.View.OnTouchListener)

You will probably put it in your onCreate method roughly this way (tested this time) :

Activity onCreate code

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    final TextView textView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textView);
    // this is the view on which you will listen for touch events
    final View touchView = findViewById(R.id.touchView);
    touchView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            textView.setText("Touch coordinates : " +
                String.valueOf(event.getX()) + "x" + String.valueOf(event.getY()));
                return true;
        }
    });
}

layout code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>                                      
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    >
<TextView  
    android:id="@+id/touchView" 
    android:background="#f00" 
    android:layout_weight="1" 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    />
<TextView  
    android:id="@+id/textView" 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    android:text="Hello World, TestActivity"
    />
</LinearLayout>

Edit: I tried my code and indeed there were a few errors. Anyway, with the layout I give you here it works on my emulator. Can you provide maybe more code/context so I can see what's wrong?

It sounds like you want to get touch events from the whole area of your layout for this particular test. Try attaching the touch listener to your parent view rather than a separate target view.

This isn't a very common approach. In most cases you will want to listen for touch events in a specific child view and if you have other views in your layout that handle touch events (such as a button) they'll take priority over a parent view. See http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/ui-events.html for more info about handling UI events.

Layout (touch_viewer.xml):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:id="@+id/parent" >
    <TextView android:id="@+id/text"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:text="Hello, World!" />
</LinearLayout>

And in your activity:

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.touch_viewer);

    final LinearLayout parent = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.parent);
    final TextView text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text);
    parent.setOnTouchListener(new OnTouchListener() {
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent ev) {
            text.setText("Touch at " + ev.getX() + ", " + ev.getY());
            return true;
        }
    });
}

The following works using a touch screen on the jetboy sample android app. Joes code worked with one tweak to make it shine the background thru. The only line I added was

android:background="#0000"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"   
android:layout_height="fill_parent" 

Thanks Joe (above).

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);
    final TextView textView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textView);
    // this is the view on which you will listen for touch events
    final View touchView = findViewById(R.id.touchView);
    touchView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
        @Override
        public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
            textView.setText("Touch coordinates : " +
                String.valueOf(event.getX()) + "x" + String.valueOf(event.getY()));
                return true;
        }
    });
}

layout code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent">

    <com.android.samples.jetboy.JetBoyView android:id="@+id/JetBoyView"
        android:layout_width="fill_parent"
        android:layout_height="fill_parent" />
        <TextView  
                android:id="@+id/touchView" 
                android:background="#0000" 
                android:layout_weight="1" 
                android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
                android:layout_height="fill_parent" 
        />
        <TextView  
                android:id="@+id/textView" 
                android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
                android:layout_height="fill_parent" 
                android:text="Hello World, TestActivity"
        />
</FrameLayout>

The corrected version without the errors:

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.view.Menu;
import android.view.MotionEvent;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.TextView;
public class MainActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
        final TextView textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.textView);
        // this is the view on which you will listen for touch events
        final View touchView = findViewById(R.id.touchView);
        touchView.setOnTouchListener(new View.OnTouchListener() {
            @Override
            public boolean onTouch(View v, MotionEvent event) {
                textView.setText("Touch coordinates : "
                        + String.valueOf(event.getX()) + "x"
                        + String.valueOf(event.getY()));
                return true;
            }
        });
    }
    @Override
    public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
        // Inflate the menu; this adds items to the action bar if it is present.
        getMenuInflater().inflate(R.menu.main, menu);
        return true;
    }
}