Screen Density, dip, and resizing?

[DevBaby]

The views I created in the designer have location dimension in pixels only, not dip. For example Top = 80 as opposed to Top = 80dip. My layout has 160 density, Scale = 1. In short, I did not think this mattered in the designer, although I did read to use dip in a coding example.

Ultimately, when testing on a device with higher density than 160, my views automatically resized by a factor of 1.5 and no longer fit on the screen. As a quick fix, I believe I can read the device’s density and run a loop through each view and reset their size according to the density factor (1.5).

Does every Android device have a standard density (160, 240, 320 etc) that will result in a .75 or 1.5, or 2 scale factor?

I can, though painfully, go back into the designer and edit each position item to dip. But if I can fix this through code to reverse the scaling, I would much rather do this in code if I am guaranteed that every device will have 1 of the 4 density values I have read about. If there are many different density values (149, 172 etc) and scaling factors, then I would most likely have to edit each view in my designer layout.

Is there a way to edit the bal file to quickly make this adjustment for dip?

 

[NJDude]

The .bal file is where the layout is saved, you cannot edit that since is not a "text" file.

You will have to manually add "dip" to your source, and by the way, you MUST use dip to position views that way they will scale properly on any device.

 

[DevBaby]

Thanks NJDude,

Why did my views scale anyway given that I did not use dip values in the designer? That is where I am having my problem.

I have a rescaling routine that I developed myself to resize for different size screens. This code has worked fine for every device until I tested one that had a density value greater than the 160 in my layout; then the values that I set in the designer (let’s say 80) automatically became 120 when the program loaded on the device with the higher density value.

I actually do not want my views to automatically resize because I prefer to handle different screen sizes in code based on the original layout I set in the designer.