Android MapView Balloons

This project provides an easy way to annotate map overlay items with a simple information balloon when using the Android Maps external library (com.google.android.maps). It consists of BalloonOverlayView, a view representing the balloon that is displayed over your MapView and BalloonItemizedOverlay, an abstract extension of ItemizedOverlay.

The presentation of the balloons was mostly reverse engineered from Google's Places Directory application.

Basic Usage

Create a subclass of BalloonItemizedOverlay in the same way you would do for the base ItemizedOverlay class. Rather than overriding onTap() (which is already implemented and final in the subclass to invoke the balloon view display for each item tap), you override onBalloonTap() to handle a screen tap event on the balloon itself.

The data displayed in each balloon is mapped to the title and snippet arguments you provide to the constructor of each OverlayItem.

The repository contains a working sample application project which fully demonstrates its usage.

Custom Layouts

You can create your own balloon look & feel and custom data mapping by creating a subclass of BalloonOverlayView with a generic type that extends OverlayItem. Override the setupView(Context context, final ViewGroup parent) method and inflate your own XML layout using parent as the root of its view hierachy.

One caveat with custom layouts is that you MUST include a layout container that represents the clickable action area of your balloon whose id property is android:id="@id/balloon_inner_layout".

An example custom layout and data mapping which downloads an image from the internet and displays it in an ImageView is included in the sample application project.

Implementation

As of version 1.1, android-mapviewballoons is an Android Library project. Refer to Referencing a library project in this document for instructions on how to include it in your own Android project. Ensure you have the latest Android SDK, tools and Eclipse plugin installed.

To install the library and sample project in Eclipse:

Select File, Import, Existing projects into workspace...
Select the root folder where you cloned/downloaded the repository to import both projects.
Use Project - Clean if there are any errors.

Whats Missing?

Long press support
Trackball/cursor support

Credits

Author: Jeff Gilfelt

The code in this project is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0.
Copyright (c) 2011 readyState Software Ltd.

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