material-components / material-components/material-components-android

Add tabs adapter for TabLayout

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#32 1 comment 10 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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feature request
Dominant language
Java
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Description

`TabLayout` creates the tabs in an opaque, non-extensible way and there is no way to provide a custom view at creation time, you have to hack around it with an observer set on the content source (e.g., a `ViewPager` adapter) and then use `setCustomView()` on each tab, after they're created.

Besides, the way tabs' views are created prevents libraries such as [Calligraphy](https://github.com/chrisjenx/Calligraphy/) from correctly applying a typeface to the default tab views, because the `TextAppearance` is applied only after inflating the view, and there's no way to access the tabs pool nor any hook into the creation of new tabs.

### Suggested changes

Have a mechanism to create and bind the tabs' views, similar to list adapters, that have a `createTabView()` and a `bindTabView()` methods. The default implementation would simply retain the current behaviour; users could extend the default implementation to tweak the tabs' appearance (e.g., `CalligraphyUtils.applyFontToTextView(tabTextView, typeface);`) or to inflate their custom tab views without the waste of always inflating the default layout anyways.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the TabLayout tab-creation path described in the issue, including its interaction with a ViewPager adapter. Define how createTabView() and bindTabView() would preserve the default behavior while allowing custom views and typeface application; done means callers can customize creation without observing the content source or inflating an unused default layout.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
android, java
Domain
mobile
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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