Adding an Icon on a Spinner on Android

Ever since I started using spinners I keep discovering how many constrains exist in this widget. At first it was the fact that the text size/type is a challenge to customize and recently the discovery I made was on how to add an icon to the Spinner widget.

It’s quite simple to add a drawable to a TextView Widget or an EditText Widget but for a Spinner it’s not as straight forward as this.

I know someone might have struggled like me, so here are the steps I used to accomplish this.

Step 1. Create an array and a desired background “image.xml” file.

gender_array

spinner_rect.xml

Step 2. Add the spinner widget in your layout file as follows.

Step 3. Create a layout file with the desired icon as follows.

gender_spinner_row.xml

Step 4. Listen to the spinner events and add the different spinner layouts/items on the main activity’s java file.

Final Result.

Reference Links: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/controls/spinner.html

http://android-er.blogspot.co.ke/2010/12/custom-spinner-with-icon.html

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