In Android, the common "pull to refresh" UX concept is not built in to a ListView. However, many Android applications would like to make use of this concept for their feeds. This is useful for all sorts of feeds such as a Twitter timeline.

Thankfully, there is an excellent third-party pull-to-refresh library that can be used to make this interaction extremely easy to implement.

Download the zip of pull-to-refresh and then import the library folder into Eclipse with File => Import => Existing Android Code Into Workspace. Call the project "PullToRefresh" and then start the import. This folder is now a "library project" and can then be included as a library in your Android apps. Make sure to mark this project as a library and then include the library in your application Check the Detailed Instructions Here for a step-by-step of this process.

Next, for each ListView that we want to add pull-to-refresh functionality to, we need to replace the ListView in the XML with the new third-party eu.erikw.PullToRefreshListView which has all the same features of a ListView. For example:

<ListView
    android:id="@+id/pull_to_refresh_listview"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" />

would be replaced with:

<eu.erikw.PullToRefreshListView
    android:id="@+id/pull_to_refresh_listview"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" />

All other properties in the XML can stay the same.

Now, we need to specify a OnRefreshListener for each PullToRefreshListView which describes the process for refreshing the contents. This is usually an asynchronous network request for new data from an API. For example:

public class TimelineActivity extends Activity {
    PullToRefreshListView lvTweets;

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_timeline);
        lvTweets = (PullToRefreshListView) findViewById(R.id.lvHomeTimeline);
        // Set a listener to be invoked when the list should be refreshed.
        lvTweets.setOnRefreshListener(new OnRefreshListener() {
            @Override
            public void onRefresh() {
                // Your code to refresh the list contents
                // Make sure you call listView.onRefreshComplete()
                // once the loading is done. This can be done from here or any
                // place such as when the network request has completed successfully.
                fetchTimelineAsync(0);
            }
        });
    }

    public void fetchTimelineAsync(int page) {
        client.getHomeTimeline(0, new JsonHttpResponseHandler() {
            public void onSuccess(JSONArray json) {
                // ...the data has come back, finish populating listview...
                // Now we call onRefreshComplete to signify refresh has finished
                lvTweets.onRefreshComplete();
            }

            public void onFailure(Throwable e) {
                Log.d("DEBUG", "Fetch timeline error: " + e.toString());
            }
        });
    }
}

The library has rich support for customizing the refresh graphics. To do so, override the style attributes to your liking, like the following example:

<style name="ptr_text">
        
    <!-- Change the text style and color -->
    <item name="android:textStyle">bold|italic</item>
    <item name="android:textColor">#cccccc</item>
</style>

The various styles you can override are;

• ptr_headerContainer
• ptr_header
• ptr_arrow
• ptr_spinner
• ptr_text

Check out the official library readme for more details.

• https://github.com/erikwt/PullToRefresh-ListView - Third-party library for pull to refresh