Share via

Xamarin.Android Switch

The Switch widget (shown below) allows a user to toggle between two states, such as ON or OFF. The Switch default value is OFF. The widget is shown below in both its ON and OFF states:

Screenshots of a Switch widget in OFF and ON states

Creating a Switch

To create a switch, simply declare a Switch element in XML as follows:

<Switch android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

This creates a basic switch as shown below:

Screenshot of demo app displaying a Switch in the OFF state

Changing Default Values

Both the text that the control displays for the ON and OFF states and the default value are configurable. For example, to make the Switch default to ON and read NO/YES instead of OFF/ON, we can set the checked, textOn, and textOff attributes in the following XML.

<Switch android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:checked="true"
        android:textOn="YES"
        android:textOff="NO" />

Providing a Title

The Switch widget also supports including a text label by setting the text attribute as follows:

<Switch android:text="Is Xamarin.Android great?"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:checked="true"
        android:textOn="YES"
        android:textOff="NO" />

This markup produces the following screenshot at runtime:

Screenshot of demo app with text horizontally preceding the Switch widget

When a Switch's value changes, it raises a CheckedChange event. For example, in the following code we capture this event and present a Toast widget with a message based upon the isChecked value of Switch, which is passed to the event handler as part of the CompoundButton.CheckedChangeEventArg argument.

Switch s = FindViewById<Switch> (Resource.Id.monitored_switch);
           
s.CheckedChange += delegate(object sender, CompoundButton.CheckedChangeEventArgs e) {
    var toast = Toast.MakeText (this, "Your answer is " +
        (e.IsChecked ?  "correct" : "incorrect"), ToastLength.Short);
    toast.Show ();
};