can I inflate android activity from non compiled android XML?

Question

I am wondering if it is possible to inflate an Android activity from a NON compiled android XML layout file at runtime?

Answer 1

There is nothing built into the API that will allow you to do this. The inflater requires a pull parser that works off of compiled XML files. The system takes care of a lot of things like resource binding as part of the inflation processing. From the documentation for LayoutInflater:

For performance reasons, view inflation relies heavily on pre-processing of XML files that is done at build time. Therefore, it is not currently possible to use LayoutInflater with an XmlPullParser over a plain XML file at runtime; it only works with an XmlPullParser returned from a compiled resource (R.something file.)

I suppose that you could build your own XML handler and do it yourself, but it would be a lot of work.