Restricting text to one line with EditText/TextView

I’ve let slide my habit of writing about what I’m doing. Let’s try to pick it back up.

I spent some time style-izing some things in WhenDidI. For one thing, I wanted to restrict text fields to just one line (not allowing newlines). It’s not enough to have android:lines=”1″ on the EditText. That keeps the display to one line, but doesn’t keep the user from using newlines to create a multi-line entry. This was worth creating a style for:

    <style name=”NameEditor” parent=”@android:style/Widget.EditText”>
      <item name=”android:layout_height”>wrap_content</item>
      <item name=”android:layout_width”>fill_parent</item>
      <item name=”android:lines”>1</item>
      <item name=”android:inputType”>textCapSentences|textAutoCorrect|textAutoComplete</item>
    </style>

The inputType attribute allows many different values, so check them all out. Somewhere in there is the one that lets the on-screen keyboard suggest words while you’re typing. Anyway, the point here is – if you specify inputType but don’t include textMultiLine, the user doesn’t get to use newlines.
N.B. it can be nice to put layout_height and layout_width in a style to reduce clutter – of course this isn’t a good idea all the time.
So the user can’t enter multiline text now, but they can still enter giant amounts of text, and I’m wanting these values to display in one line in a ListView item. How do you cut text short in display? Well, there’s the android:ellipsize attribute, but this doesn’t actually seem to work. That bug report contains a workaround, however, without even using any deprecated attributes:
    <style name=”EllipseText” parent=”@android:style/Widget.TextView”>
      <item name=”android:lines”>1</item>
      <item name=”android:scrollHorizontally”>true</item>
      <item name=”android:ellipsize”>end</item>
   </style>
This does the trick, although in my scrolling ListView the ellipses seem to only show two dots instead of three. Maybe judicious use of padding / margins will fix that.