Setting absolute position of view

Several useful comments in this question in stackoverflow.

Key section fromAndy Zhang:

You can use RelativeLayout. Let’s say you wanted a 30×40 ImageView at position (50,60) inside your layout. Somewhere in your activity:

// Some existing RelativeLayout from your layout xml
RelativeLayout rl = (RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.my_relative_layout);

ImageView iv = new ImageView(this);

RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 50;
params.topMargin = 60;
rl.addView(iv, params);

More examples:

Places two 30×40 ImageViews (one yellow, one red) at (50,60) and (80,90), respectively:

RelativeLayout rl = (RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.my_relative_layout);
ImageView iv;
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params;

iv = new ImageView(this);
iv.setBackgroundColor(Color.YELLOW);
params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 50;
params.topMargin = 60;
rl.addView(iv, params);

iv = new ImageView(this);
iv.setBackgroundColor(Color.RED);
params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 80;
params.topMargin = 90;
rl.addView(iv, params);

Places one 30×40 yellow ImageView at (50,60) and another 30×40 red ImageView <80,90> relative to the yellow ImageView:

RelativeLayout rl = (RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.my_relative_layout);
ImageView iv;
RelativeLayout.LayoutParams params;

int yellow_iv_id = 123; // Some arbitrary ID value.

iv = new ImageView(this);
iv.setId(yellow_iv_id);
iv.setBackgroundColor(Color.YELLOW);
params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 50;
params.topMargin = 60;
rl.addView(iv, params);

iv = new ImageView(this);
iv.setBackgroundColor(Color.RED);
params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 80;
params.topMargin = 90;

// This line defines how params.leftMargin and params.topMargin are interpreted.
// In this case, "<80,90>" means <80,90> to the right of the yellow ImageView.
params.addRule(RelativeLayout.RIGHT_OF, yellow_iv_id);

rl.addView(iv, params);

Added comments from Excrubulent.

Just to add to Andy Zhang’s answer above, if you want to, you can give param to rl.addView, then make changes to it later, so:

params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
params.leftMargin = 50;
params.topMargin = 60;
rl.addView(iv, params);

Could equally well be written as:

params = new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(30, 40);
rl.addView(iv, params);
params.leftMargin = 50;
params.topMargin = 60;

So if you retain the params variable, you can change the layout of iv at any time after adding it to rl.