Android bits and pieces: sliding tabs for ViewPager

May 9th, 2013

The latest release of Play Store has introduced a more streamlined look-and-feel for the tab strip of our ViewPagers. If you don’t use it in your project, you should.

ViewPager comes with two implementations of the tab strip – PagerTitleStrip and PagerTabStrip. The first one is not really worth talking about. The second one is much nicer, allowing tapping the titles to switch to the relevant tab and exposing APIs to control a couple of visual aspects. We were using PagerTabStrip up until the latest iteration of the store app. That is, until our visual designers wanted a nicer appearance that is more inline with the general direction of where the platform tab indicator is heading.

On the visual side of things, we wanted to:

  • Use different colors for full underline and the selected tab indicator.
  • Use translucent vertical separators between the tabs.
  • Have the left-of-the current tab “peek out” to indicate that there’s additional content available.
  • More compact display of tabs – instead of having left/right title all the way at the edges (which looked particularly bad on wide tablets), display the title tabs as a “connected” chain.
  • Nicer swiping feedback as the user swipes between tabs.

As it turns out, you can write your own tab strip control.

Step 1: make yourself familiar with the source code of the existing components. That always helps.
Step 2: throw some code around and see how it looks like on the screen. At some point, after enough Mountain Dew has been consumed, it starts looking somewhat decent. Rinse and repeat.

Let’s talk about the particular implementation details.

  • Each tab title is a TextView. This provides nice accessibility support. Mark it as focusable and set a background drawable that has your app’s assets for pressed and focused state.
  • If the content of your ViewPager is static, iterate over all page titles and create a TextView for each one. Set a click listener on each text to call ViewPager.setCurrentItem.
  • Add a global layout listener and call scrollToChild with ViewPager.getCurrentItem. Don’t forget to remove that listener after you’re done with the initial scroll. The intent here is to respect the initial tab selection and scroll the selected tab into view.
  • Implement ViewPager.OnPageChangeListener (somewhere outside your view pager / tab strip).
  • In onPageScrollStateChanged remember the current scroll state.
  • In onPageSelected if the current scroll state is SCROLL_STATE_IDLE, remember the selected index, set offset (more on this in the next points) to 0 and call invalidate on your tab strip.
  • In onPageScrolled remember the selected index and the offset, call invalidate on your tab strip and also call scrollTo on the tab strip to scroll its contents based on the selected index and the offset.
  • You want to keep the scroll state of the tab strip in sync with what the user is doing with the your view pager. If the user swipes right to go to the tab that is currently to the left, you want to start scrolling the title of that tab as well. How much? That depends on your design. Our target is to have some part of that title always peeking in. So you would need to compute the value of the first parameter of scrollTo based on the tab index, relative scroll offset and that extra peeking delta.
  • Now about the pretty pixels. Designers love assets. You can create a whole bunch of assets for the individual tab – normal state, pressed state, focused state, pressed+focused state, let’s throw the selected state in, and what about the disabled state? That’s nice. But. Take a look at the second screenshot – the selected underline “slides” between the two tabs. That’s not something that you can do with assets set on each individual TextView behind these two tabs. I guess you can do an empty View, set those assets on it and start laying it out dynamically as you slide. Kind of gross.
  • So instead, right now we’re painting the underlines in code. Canvas.drawRect is your friend. Just don’t create the Paint objects every single time in onDraw.
  • First layer the thick colored selection underline. This is where you need the index of the selected tab and the relative scroll amount. During scroll, this underline “slides” from one tab to the next (left or right). So you use the scroll amount to interpolate the X coordinate of both the left and the right edge of that underline based on the X coordinates of the two tabs.
  • Second layer is the thin transparent black underline that goes across the entire tab strip. Using transparency creates a nice layered effect across the bottom edge of the colored underline.
  • Finally, since we’re already drawing lines in code, why not draw the vertical separators in code too? These can be done with drawables set on each title TextView, but you have the edge case of the first/last tab. Since we want separators between the tabs, but not on the outside, you’d need to create two sets of assets – one for the tabs that show that separator (say, along the right edge), and one for that special tab that doesn’t (in this case, the very last tab). If you use translucent black for these separators, you’ll get a nice blend with the press/focus highlight assets set on the tabs – provided that they are translucent too.
  • You’ll need to provide a way to swipe the tabs themselves. Our current solution is to have the tab views live in a horizontal LinearLayout that lives inside a HorizontalScrollView.

So, to summarize. Track the scrolling. Draw translucent lines. Make your designers happy.  Oh, almost forgot. Don’t ignore edge cases. Such as, say, all the tabs fitting in on the screen – in which case you don’t need anything to “peek in” from the left edge.