Android square text view with center text

Android is an awesome OS with great extensibility. And being open source it gives the developers a great leverage to build components on their own. One such need I came through is to have a Square Text View. For a rectangle to be a square, all we need is to keep its width = height. Keeping this simple logic in mind, here’s what I did to make a square text view :

@Override
protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
int max = Math.max(getMeasuredWidth(), getMeasuredHeight());
setMeasuredDimension(max, max);
}
Override onMeasure() method in the new class extended from AppCompatTextView.

Making a TextView square wasn’t challenging. But wait, I noticed the new text view isn’t honouring the “gravity” attribute applied to it. Here’s how it looks like:

Android square text view gravity issue

Upon investigating, I observed the TextView seems to be ignoring the gravity attribute upon calling setMeasuredDimensions(). To overcome this issue, I modified the onMeasure method as:

@Override
    protected void onMeasure(int widthMeasureSpec, int heightMeasureSpec) {
        super.onMeasure(widthMeasureSpec, heightMeasureSpec);
        if (isSquare) {
            int width = this.getMeasuredWidth();
            int height = this.getMeasuredHeight();
            int size = Math.max(width, height);
            int widthSpec = MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(size, MeasureSpec.EXACTLY);
            int heightSpec = MeasureSpec.makeMeasureSpec(size, MeasureSpec.EXACTLY);
            super.onMeasure(widthSpec, heightSpec);
        }
    }

And voila, problem solved! The text view widget now displays the centre-aligned text properly. I have used the same method in many of my projects and this is working fine.

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