What triggers a View’s measure() to be called

In order to trigger a measure pass for a custom View you must call the requestLayout() method.
For example, if you are implementing a custom view that extends View and it will behave like a TextView, you could write a setText method like this:

/**
 * Sets the string value of the view.
 * @param text the string to write
 */
public void setText(String text) {
    this.text = text;

            //calculates the new text width
    textWidth = mTextPaint.measureText(text);

    //force re-calculating the layout dimension and the redraw of the view
    requestLayout();
    invalidate();
}