// the find
commonsguy/cwac-merge
CommonsWare Android Components: MergeAdapter
MergeAdapter lets you combine multiple ListView adapters and plain Views into a single adapter, useful for lists that mix heterogeneous sections. It solved a real gap in the pre-RecyclerView Android era. The project was officially discontinued in 2019 and the repo was set to go private in June 2020.
The setActive() toggle for showing/hiding sections without rebuilding the adapter is a genuinely useful pattern. Correctly propagating dataset-changed notifications from child adapters to the parent is non-trivial and this gets it right. MergeSpinnerAdapter covering Spinner widgets, not just ListView, shows attention to the full AdapterView surface.
This is dead software — explicitly discontinued, targeting ListView which itself has been deprecated in favor of RecyclerView since 2014. Any new Android project should use ConcatAdapter from androidx.recyclerview instead, which ships with official support and active maintenance. The external dependency on cwac-sacklist adds friction for no modern benefit. JAR-based distribution via a custom S3 Maven repo is a liability in 2026 — that URL may not resolve.