title: Android: Is it possible to make a copy of a View?
body: <p>The app I am working on requires a dynamic layout that displays a HorizontalScrollView of profiles. A profile is simply a RelativeLayout with a picture and some text. Since I get the data from a data file, I need to create a Relative layout for each of profiles. At first I created each RelativeLayout programmatically in a for loop and then added it to the parent view. This works, but I don't want to do it this way. I want to use different layout files based on the screen size of the device, etc.</p>
  
  <p>Then I thought. Well, what if I had a Layout with just one profile on it? My code could get that one profile with <code>findViewById()</code> and then create new ones based off of it! In other words:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    // get the layout
      profileLayout = (LinearLayout) findViewById(R.id.profileLayout);        
  
      // get the first profile in the layout
      originalProfile = (RelativeLayout) findViewById(R.id.profile1);
  
      // make copy of profile
      temporaryProfile = originalProfile;
  
      // make changes to the this profile and add it back
      profileLayout.addView(temporaryProfile);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Of course, this doesn't work because this is java and temporaryProfile is now a reference to originalProfile. So is there any way to make a copy of this RelativeLayout? I'm aware of LayoutInflater, but I still don't understand how it works. There is also <code>Object.clone()</code>.</p>