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I was following an Android tutorial about RelativeLayout which just made a basic layout of two EditTexts (first name and last name fields) and a Button(not important). The first name EditText view had a layout_width of 0dp, but was still visible on the screen. I messed around with the width value and it seemed that no matter what value I gave it, the size of the EditText stayed the same. Why is that? Does it have something to do with the layout_toLeftOf statement? Below are links to the tutorial along with a picture of my xml code and the resulting output.

Tutorial Link: http://tinyurl.com/jjnfw7z

note: the button code/output is not a worry

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The width of the EditText with id first_name is completely specified by these two constraints:

android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" android:layout_toLeftOf="@+id/last_name"
  • android:layout_alignParentLeft="true" implies that the left edge of this EditText must match the left edge of the parent view.
  • android:layout_toLeftOf="@+id/last_name" implies that the right edge of this EditText must match the left edge of the sibling view with id last_name.

By design, these take priority over any specified layout_width value, which is why you can change that dp width with no visible effect. It is common to set the width to 0dp in such cases; since the layout_width attribute is required, a value of zero is the clearest possible indicator that the view's width is being determined elsewhere (by other attributes; in code, etc.)

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