Android Activity as a Dialog

Android Activity as a dialog

To start activity as dialog I defined it like this in AndroidManifest.xml:

<activity android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Dialog" />

Use this property inside your activity tag to avoid that your Dialog appears in the recently used apps list

android:excludeFromRecents="true"

If you want to stop your dialog / activity from being destroyed when the user clicks outside of the dialog:

After setContentView() in your Activity use:

this.setFinishOnTouchOutside(false);

Now when I call startActivity() it displays as a dialog, with the previous activity shown when the user presses the back button.

Note that if you are using ActionBarActivity (or AppCompat theme), you'll need to use @style/Theme.AppCompat.Dialog instead.

How to show an Activity as a dialog box rather than a new screen?

In your AndroidManifest manifest file define your activity like this :

<activity android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Dialog"
          android:excludeFromRecents="true" />

and If you want your activity to not be cancelable when the user clicks outside it just add the following line in your Activity.Java file inside onCreate method :

this.setFinishOnTouchOutside(false);

Showing activity with custom dialog in Android

More often than not these seemingly beautiful alert dialogs are not alertdialogs at all but an activity having a transparent background. Onclicklisteners are duly placed(for example clicking the transparent background will close the activity). Therefore designing these activities is easier compared to customizing an alertdialog

How can I show my activity as a dialog in Android?

After deciding to look at what I wanted to do, instead of how to do it specifically, I found a different approach. I reasked my question looking for approach ideas instead of implementation ideas here. GalDude33 helped me figure out how to achieve what I wanted. His answer there was the answer to this Q.

how to programatically theme an activity to be like a dialog?

Background

The Activity behind an Acivity is drawn if the foreground activity's theme according to its AndroidManifest.xml is a dialog; otherwise the android os will not draw the Activity behind it (probably to save memory since it usually won't be seen anyway).

To exploit this, we set the theme of our Acitvity to a dialog in the manifest, making the android os draw the Activity behind it, but later, programatically set our Activity's theme to whatever we like at runtime.

Example on github

I made an example and put it on github.

Tutorial

Step 1: create two custom themes for your application in styles.xml. One for normal activities, and another for dialog activities. It is important for the custom dialog theme to inherit from a base theme that is also a dialog. In my case, the parent theme is Base.Theme.AppCompat.Light.Dialog.FixedSize). Here is my styles.xml:

<resources>

    <!-- custom normal activity theme -->    
    <style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.NoActionBar">
    </style>

    <!-- custom dialog activity theme -->
    <style name="AppTheme.Dialog" parent="Base.Theme.AppCompat.Light.Dialog.FixedSize">
        <!-- removing the dialog's action bar -->
        <item name="windowActionBar">false</item>
        <item name="windowNoTitle">true</item>
    </style>

</resources>

Step 2: in the AndroidManifest.xml, set the theme of the Activity in question to any dialog theme. This makes the android os think that the Activity is a dialog, so it will draw the Activity behind it, and not black it out. In my case, I used Theme.AppCompat.Dialog. Below is my AndroidManifest.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
          package="com.example.eric.questiondialog_artifact">

    <application
        android:allowBackup="true"
        android:icon="@mipmap/ic_launcher"
        android:label="@string/app_name">
        <activity
            android:name=".DialogActivity"
            android:label="@string/app_name"
            android:theme="@style/Theme.AppCompat.Dialog"> <-- IMPORTANT!!! -->
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>
    </application>

</manifest>

Step 3: in the actual activity, set the theme programatically to either the theme for normal activities, or the theme for dialogs. My DialogActivity.java is below:

package com.example.eric.questiondialog_artifact;

import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v7.app.AppCompatActivity;
import android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar;

public class DialogActivity extends AppCompatActivity
{
    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {
        setTheme(R.style.AppTheme_Dialog); // can either use R.style.AppTheme_Dialog or R.style.AppTheme as deined in styles.xml
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_dialog);
    }
}

activity as dialog in android

try with following property

    this.setFinishOnTouchOutside(false);

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