Android: How to set the height and width of a DialogFragment

If you've played around with creating dialogs using the DialogFragment class, you've probably noticed that the layout_width and layout_height parameters that you assign in your DialogFragment's xml layout file are ignored (disrespected!) and the operating system assigns height and width to your DialogFragment however it so wishes!

Because of this problem and because it is highly recommended to create dialogs with the DialogFragment class, what I do now is specify the layout_width and layout_height parameters in my DialogFragment's xml layout file as match_parent. And then, more importantly, I specify the dialog's height and width in my DialogFragment.onStart() method as follows:

 
@Override
public void onStart() {
  super.onStart();

  // safety check
  if (getDialog() == null) {
    return;
  }

  int dialogWidth = ... // specify a value here
  int dialogHeight = ... // specify a value here

  getDialog().getWindow().setLayout(dialogWidth, dialogHeight);

  // ... other stuff you want to do in your onStart() method
}