Using fragments and BottomNavigationBar - android

I am creating a shopping list app and was thinking of using BottomNavigationBar for it, so the three components of the bar will be List, Done, and Manage Categories or something.
Would this be a good way to go about my shopping list app? Would it work if I wanted it so if the user ticked of CheckBoxes in the List fragment, those items would move to the Done fragment? Or should I just use separate Activity?

You should use Activity with FrameLayout as a container for Fragments and BottomNavigationBar. Don't use multiple Activities in this case, it's not good practice.
What about checking boxes and sending information between fragments? You can save info to .txt file, some database (Room or Realm for example) or keep that information inside Activity and just send it to Fragment while creating them.

Related

Reusing the MainActivity in Android

I have a MainActivity in my Android Application where I am showing a list of items in a RecyclerView.
Each Item can have multiple sub items, and sub items can have its own child items too (like a tree).
I want to show the same activity for main and sub items, but with an Back Arrow on ActionBar.
Is it possible to reuse MainActivity?
yes, you can do this using fragments. Instead of showing lists in MainActivity take a fragment container in MainActivity and create fragments where you can show your lists and subitems according to your requirement.
By checking fragment instance in MainActivity, you can show and hide backarrow of actionbar.
Check this
Yes, it is possible to reuse MainActivity. Each time you call startActivity without special launchMode or flags, a new instance of MainActivity will be created and it is considered an absolutely new one.
I have encountered a similar problem while working on a File Manager application. So What I did is created a FolderNavigator stack that helped me in keeping the track of users current position using which I showed breadcrumbs at the top. And I hooked my fragment with this navigator so as soon as the peek of stack changes my folder gets notified and it will load the data of the peek of the stack. When I press back I will just pop the stack and as my fragment is already hooked with the peek of stack it will show the respective data.
You can use fragments to fulfill your requirements.
From this SO answer:
Fragments are more of a UI benefit in my opinion. It's convenient for the user sometimes to see two different views of two different classes on the same screen.
For more about fragments, read this document.

Clarification on the structure of my app

Some background info first. I require my app to show a feed of posts, implemented as cards. The data within the posts/cards is retrieved from my site's REST API. My app has 3 different tabs, each containing a different feed of posts/cards (but still the same layout).
Currently, I have an activity_main and the 3 fragments made for each tab (fragment_1, fragment_2, fragment_3). To my understanding, a Fragment is a layout that can be re-used on different Activities. Is this correct?
Additionally, where should I implement the layout/design for the cards? Should it be directly within the separate Fragments (even though the layout of the cards will be the same across all 3 tabs)?
After implementing the card layout, how would I populate the cards given the requested REST API json data? In other words, how would I loop through each result and insert the data into the card and display it on the screen?
Sorry for the noob questions.
Currently, I have an activity_main and the 3 fragments made for each
tab (fragment_1, fragment_2, fragment_3). To my understanding, a
Fragment is a layout that can be re-used on different Activities. Is
this correct?
Yes.
Additionally, where should I implement the layout/design for the
cards? Should it be directly within the separate Fragments (even
though the layout of the cards will be the same across all 3 tabs)?
Have a single fragment. Create 3 instances of this fragment and inflate the same layout/design if the layout of the cards will be the same across all 3 tabs.
After implementing the card layout, how would I populate the cards
given the requested REST API json data? In other words, how would I
loop through each result and insert the data into the card and display
it on the screen?
Pass a unique identifier that identifies the feeds (for this fragment) to the fragment as a bundle when you create a new instance and set them as the fragments argument. You can then retrieve this information to retrieve data relevant for this fragment.
To display the data, use a ListView/RecyclerView along with a suitable adapter to connect your data to your view.
I hope this answers your question.
OK. Lets try this. Yes, you are right, Fragments are basically layouts that can be used in different Activities. As it says on Android Developers site:
A Fragment represents a behavior or a portion of user interface in an
Activity. You can combine multiple fragments in a single activity to
build a multi-pane UI and reuse a fragment in multiple activities.
Having that said, since it is the same layout for all three tabs, you can use only one Fragment and populate it with different data. So if you want to change anything, you would do it only within that one fragment.
For the cards I am guessing that you will be using a custom ListView adapter. And that you should (must) implement outside the Fragments.
And regarding the last question, there are many libraries that make consuming ReST webservices much easier. For example Retrofit.

Android Fragments: Sharing Code with Dual UIs (stack-of-cards phone and side-by-side tablet)

I have a typical dual UI scenario - a list of categories, which when one is clicked, loads a category detail fragment containing a list of items in that category. On the phone, it's implemented as a stack-of-cards UI, opening up the details in a separate activity on top of the category list. On a tablet, it's the category list on the left, with the details on the right.
In the details pane, there's a button to add an item. The details fragment has an interface, required of Activities, with an onClickAddItem method, which should bring up a DialogFragment to ask you for the details of the item and add it when it returns.
The problem: both the tablet version's all-in-one Activity and the phone's standalone details Activity need the same onClickAddItem logic. There's a sinking feeling deep in my gut that the proper solution for this is to pull that logic out into yet another class, but the need to create several million files to do simple things in Android is slowly driving me insane, so I'm hoping there's another best practice I'm overlooking here. Thanks!
If your "add" button is in the detail fragment, there is no reason to handle the click event in the activity.
I think you should put the click event handling in your detail fragment.
Why do you want to keep all database access in the activity ? Make sure you're properly abstracting database access ( using a ContentProvider for example ) and don't be shy to use your abstraction wherever it makes sense. Adding an item using a ContentProvider should be as simple as:
getContentResolver().insert(myUri, myNewItemContentValues);
It you need to display a dialog, just get a reference to the current activity from the detail fragment, and use it to display your dialog.
If several fragments share the same functionality, you may need to write a simple helper class with some methods like:
public void showAddItemDialog(Activity activity)

What parts of an Android app should be fragments?

I am going to develop an app with the following structure:
Search: Lets user search for articles and displays search results in a list
Article: Displays an article
UserList: Displays a list of articles the user has chosen to add to the list
UserListItem: An item that represents an article in the list mentioned above, and lets the user add custom information via some EditText-fields.
The Search, Article and UserList seem like they could be implemented as fragments. But what about the UserListItem? There will of course be multiple UserListItems on the screen at the same time, could it still be implemented as a fragment? If not, how should it be implemented?
I'm having some trouble grasping the whole fragment concept. It seems obvious how to use it in the standard scenario, i.e. Search-pane and Article-pane. But it's a bit unclear to me if it should/could be used in a scenario where you will have multiple instances of the same fragment displaying at the same time.
I haven't yet written any code, because I want to have the overall structure clear before I start, so I don't have to go back and change everything.
This might be a bit much if you are a beginner, but if you want to add searching capabilities in your application, consider creating a search interface.
From the documentation on Fragments:
You can think of a fragment as a modular section of an activity, which
has its own lifecycle, receives its own input events, and which you
can add or remove while the activity is running (sort of like a "sub
activity" that you can reuse in different activities).
That being said, there is a huge difference between incorporating a behavior in your screen's layout and wrapping that behavior in a Fragment. In your case, it really wouldn't make sense to wrap each list item in a Fragment as it would be ridiculously inefficient to instantiate a new Fragment for each item in your ListView. Representing each list item as a Fragment would give each row its own lifecycle, which is obviously not what you want. What you probably want to do instead is represent each list item in XML, and have the Fragment (or Activity) that holds your ListView manage these list items as necessary.

Android - Dual ListViews Fragments on Android UI

I'm new to android development, and I have doubts about working with fragments.
I have to build an App that runs 2 ListViews on the same screen, but the list on the right depends on what I select in the list on the left. I've looked through all the tutorials and samples about the working with Fragments, and I haven't found a way to do that succesfully.
I want to do it in a way that I retrieve the data for the right side from an XML, so I don't have to build all the interfaces for that list one by one, just to have a template List and populate it with the corresponding data.
Any thoughts about how to do that?
You can use callback mechanism in the parent activity and maintain the references of both the fragments, just have a plain interface in the fragment which is implemented by the activity.
Call the callback in the fragment when the selection changes in the first, and communicate the same to the second fragment through the activity. You can check out the Contacts app implementation in tablet mode for the main Contacts list and Contact detail screen.

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