Cascade animation in a ListView in Android.

Here is a simple example for cascade animation of a listview in android.

We use these classes for achieving this.

1. AnimationSet
Represents a group of Animations that should be played together. The transformation of each individual animation are composed together into a single transform. If AnimationSet sets any properties that its children also set (for example, duration or fillBefore), the values of AnimationSet override the child values.

The way that AnimationSet inherits behavior from Animation is important to understand. Some of the Animation attributes applied to AnimationSet affect the AnimationSet itself, some are pushed down to the children, and some are ignored, as follows:

duration, repeatMode, fillBefore, fillAfter: These properties, when set on an AnimationSet object, will be pushed down to all child animations.
repeatCount, fillEnabled: These properties are ignored for AnimationSet.
startOffset, shareInterpolator: These properties apply to the AnimationSet itself.

2. TranslateAnimation

Read about TranslateAnimation classes here.

LayoutAnimationController
A layout animation controller is used to animated a layout’s, or a view group’s, children. Each child uses the same animation but for every one of them, the animation starts at a different time. A layout animation controller is used by ViewGroup to compute the delay by which each child’s animation start must be offset. The delay is computed by using characteristics of each child, like its index in the view group. This standard implementation computes the delay by multiplying a fixed amount of miliseconds by the index of the child in its parent view group. Subclasses are supposed to override getDelayForView(android.view.View) to implement a different way of computing the delay. For instance, a GridLayoutAnimationController will compute the delay based on the column and row indices of the child in its parent view group. Information used to compute the animation delay of each child are stored in an instance of LayoutAnimationController.AnimationParameters, itself stored in the ViewGroup.LayoutParams of the view.

Just copy this simple code to your activity and see the cascading animation in the ListView.

package com.coderzheaven.listcascadeanimation;

import android.app.ListActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.animation.AlphaAnimation;
import android.view.animation.Animation;
import android.view.animation.AnimationSet;
import android.view.animation.LayoutAnimationController;
import android.view.animation.TranslateAnimation;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.ListView;

public class MainActivity extends ListActivity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        setListAdapter(new ArrayAdapter<String>(this,
                android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, mStrings));

        AnimationSet set = new AnimationSet(true);

        Animation animation = new AlphaAnimation(0.0f, 1.0f); 
        animation.setDuration(500);
        set.addAnimation(animation);

        animation = new TranslateAnimation(
            Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, 0.0f,Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, 0.0f,
            Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, -1.0f,Animation.RELATIVE_TO_SELF, 0.0f
        );
        animation.setDuration(100);
        set.addAnimation(animation);

        LayoutAnimationController controller = new LayoutAnimationController(set, 0.5f);
        ListView listView = getListView();        
        listView.setLayoutAnimation(controller);
    }

    private String[] mStrings = {
        "Bordeaux",
        "Lyon",
        "Marseille",
        "Nancy",
        "Paris",
        "Toulouse",
        "Strasbourg"
    };
}