title: Android - Accessing buttons from SurfaceView
body: <p>I am currently working on a simple 2d tower defense game to learn some of the basics of Android game development.  To handle my graphics I have a custom object that extends SurfaceView and all of my drawing takes place on the SurfaceView's canvas object.  This is all working fine.</p>
  
  <p>I'd like my game to have two stages.  The "combat" stage and the "building stage".  In the building stage, I'm trying to add a button that can be clicked to begin the next combat stage.  From my research, it sounds like buttons can't be added to a SurfaceView, but instead I should put the SurfaceView and the button(s) inside of a relative layout and align things that way.  However, because I only want the button to show half of the time, I'm struggling with the best way to conditionally add/remove the button.  I could hack it in there, but I'd rather take my time and do things semi-correctly if possible.  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any good examples of this being done yet.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a "best practices" way to do this, or am I missing something?  Any code examples of how this can be handled would be greatly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>Update:
  I understand that I can use a layout to hold the SurfaceView and the buttons I want to display.  My problem is that the buttons need to be visible only occasionally.  What I need to do is set the visibility of the buttons in my parent layout from my SurfaceView object.  However, this is the part that I am struggling with.</p>