It is a good practice to provide the facility to filter lists in Android apps to improve the user experience. It often becomes very unpleasing to scroll through the entire list when you want to reach a certain data point. Recently I modified Connfa app to read the list of speakers from the Open Event Format. In this blog I describe how to add filtering facility in lists with Search Manager.

First, we declare the search menu so that the widget appears in it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:id="@+id/search"
        android:title="Search"
        android:icon="@drawable/search"
        android:showAsAction="collapseActionView ifRoom"
        android:actionViewClass="android.widget.SearchView" />
</menu>

In above menu item the collapseActionView attribute allows your SearchView to expand to take up the whole action bar and collapse back down into a normal action bar item when not in use. Now we create the SearchableConfiguration which defines how SearchView behaves.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<searchable
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:label="@string/app_name"
    android:hint="Search friend">
</searchable>

Also add this to the activity that will be used with <meta-data> tag in the manifest file. Then associate searchable configuration with the SearchView in the activity class

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();
    inflater.inflate(R.menu.search_menu, menu);

    SearchManager searchManager = (SearchManager)
                            getSystemService(Context.SEARCH_SERVICE);
    searchMenuItem = menu.findItem(R.id.search);
    searchView = (SearchView) searchMenuItem.getActionView();

    searchView.setSearchableInfo(searchManager.
                            getSearchableInfo(getComponentName()));
    searchView.setSubmitButtonEnabled(true);
    searchView.setOnQueryTextListener(this);

    return true;
}

Implement SearchView.OnQueryTextListener in activity, need to override two new methods now

@Override
public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String searchText) {
  
  return true;
}

@Override
public boolean onQueryTextChange(String searchedText) {

   if (mSpeakersAdapter != null) {
       lastSearchRequest = searchedText;
       mSpeakersAdapter.getFilter().filter(searchedText);
   }
   return true;
}

Find the complete implementation here. In the end it will look like this,

References

Android Search View documentation – https://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/SearchView.html