Programmatically change listview so that it is checkable - android-listview

Question

I've made a decent effort to find a similar question and failed, so please forgive me if this is redundant pollution.
I have a ListView and an ImageButton defined in the xml file "my_layout" corresponding to my Activity as follows:
<ListView
android:id="#+id/listViewItems"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_weight="1"
></ListView>
and
<ImageButton
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:src="#drawable/btn_delete_dark"
android:id="#+id/buttonDelete"
android:layout_weight="1">
</ImageButton>
I then populate the ListView programmatically in the onCreate() method of my Activity as follows:
public class ViewItemsActivity extends Activity implements OnClickListener,
OnItemClickListener{
ImageButton buttonDelete;
ListView listViewItems;
DatabaseHandler dbHandler;
#Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.my_layout);
buttonDeleteQuestion = (ImageButton) findViewById(R.id.buttonDelete);
listViewQuestions = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.listViewItems);
buttonDelete.setOnClickListener(this);
//get data from sql table containing items
dbHandler = new DatabaseHandler(this);
String [] items = dbHandler.getItems(); //get data to populate ListView
CustomAdapter adapter = new CustomAdapter(this,
android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1, items);
listViewItems.setAdapter(adapter);
listViewItems.setOnItemClickListener(this);
}
#Override
public void onClick(View v) {
switch (v.getId()) {
case R.id.buttonDelete:
listViewItems.setChoiceMode(ListView.CHOICE_MODE_MULTIPLE);
listViewItems.setItemChecked(0, true);
break;
//other cases are irrelevant
}
}
#Override
public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> parent, View v, int pos, long id) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
//non relevant code
}
}
Everything works as it should except that I want the ListView to change, in appearance and functionality, as a result of clicking buttonDelete, so that it displays checkmarks to the right of each row which can be checked by clicking on them.
It was my understanding that setChoiceMode(ListView.MULTIPLE_CHOICE) and setItemChecked(i,true) would have this effect, but clearly I've missed something as it does not.
I am quite new to android and so it is possible that I've wasted someone's time with trivialities, for which I apologize.
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

The solution was really simple, and is the following:
in the onClick event corresponding to buttonDelete, I simply created a new adapter whose layout id is *simple_list_item_multiple_choice* and assigned it to the ListView with the lines
CustomAdapter adapter = new CustomAdapter(this,
android.R.layout.simple_list_item_multiple_choice, items);
listViewItems.setAdapter(adapter);
which did the trick.