Appwidget with square layout not showing properly in landscape mode

I have built an appwidget with an square layout, and so it doesn't fit exactly in the standard widget sizes as recommended in http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/widget_design.html#sizes.

I chose a 3x2 size (android:minWidth="220dip" android:minHeight="146dip") as it is the smalllest that covers the widget's layout.

In http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/widget_design.html#design Google recommends:

"All widgets must fit within the bounding box of one of the six supported widget sizes, or better yet, within a pair of portrait and landscape orientation sizes, so your widget looks good when the user switches screen orientations"

My widget looks good in portrait mode. When switched to landscape mode (in the emulator) the layout is clipped. I tried inverting the minWidth and minHeight values in the provider's XML and then it looked perfect in landscape开发者_C百科 mode but clipped in portrait mode. Setting the size to 3x3 solves the problem, but then the widgets takes a lot of unnecessary space.

I know I can define different layouts in res/layout and res/layout-land, but in this case the layouts are not different at all, in both modes I want the widget to look square. What I would need is something like 'xml' and 'xml-land', AFAIK this is not supported in Android.

Ideas?

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What I would need is something like 'xml' and 'xml-land', AFAIK this is not supported in Android.

It is supported. All resource set qualifiers (e.g., -land) are supported for all resource types.

Whether it will help you is another matter entirely, as I am not aware that you can change actual app widget size on the fly this way.

Setting the size to 3x3 solves the problem, but then the widgets takes a lot of unnecessary space.

You are the one who is trying to force a particular pixel size (or, at least, aspect ratio). This will be fragile, as you are discovering. Furthermore, app widget cells are not guaranteed to be the same size on all devices and home screen implementations.

Hence, you are either going to need to choose an app widget size that gives you tons of extra space (your 3x3 scenario), or design a fluid app widget layout that adapts to the actual size that you are given (and therefore will not be square). Personally, I recommend the latter.