"Avoid passing null as the view root" warning when inflating view for use by AlertDialog

Use this code to inflate the dialog view without a warning:

View.inflate(context, R.layout.dialog_edit, null);

The short story is that when you are inflating a view for a dialog, parent should be null, since it is not known at View inflation time. In this case, you have three basic solutions to avoid the warning:

  1. Suppress the warning using an @Suppress
  2. Inflate the View using View's inflate method. This is just a wrapper around a LayoutInflater, and mostly just obfuscates the problem.
  3. Inflate the View using LayoutInflater's full method: inflate(int resource, ViewGroup root, boolean attachToRoot). Set attachToRoot to false.This tells the inflater that the parent is not available. In older versions of Android Lint, this removed the warning. This is no longer the case in post 1.0 versions of Android Studio.

Check out http://www.doubleencore.com/2013/05/layout-inflation-as-intended/ for a great discussion of this issue, specifically the "Every Rule Has an Exception" section at the end.


Casting null as ViewGroup resolved the warning:

View dialogView = li.inflate(R.layout.input_layout,(ViewGroup)null);

where li is the LayoutInflater's object.