what I'm trying to do is create a RelativeLayout with some buttons at the top, a line of status text, a list view and some more buttons pinned at the bottom - if the list view is empty or only has a few entries I don't want the buttons at the bottom to rise up, if it has a lot of entries I want it to scroll

At the moment I'm doing:

<rel ...
<button ..> <button ..>
<text ..>
<list view ....>
<button ..> <button ..>
</rel ...>

and I'm guessing I have to set some attribute on the list view to make it expand and/or something to tie the last two buttons to the bottom - so far my experiments have just resulted in really big buttons

can anyone point me in the right direction?