Develop Reference

Is there a way to add XML code to an XML file from a Kotlin code?

The question might seem incomprehensible just from the title alone so let me elaborate on what I mean. From what little I've dabbled in HTML and JavaScript, you could add HTML lines to the HTML file from using a Javascript function in the script.js file and it would add those HTML lines you've written into the function to the HTML file on execution and it would work as if you've written it in the HTML file to begin with. That was my understanding of how it worked, at least, if I'm wrong on my assessment feel free to correct me on that matter.
Anyway, I'm wondering if we could do a similar thing in Android Studio where we can use a Kotlin function to add an XML line/attribute/command like 'app:srcCompat="#drawable/whatever"' to an XML file.
Of course the question doesn't come from a mere sense of wonder. I currently have an application with a fragment that's supposed to get some football teams from the Room database and display them in CardViews using RecyclerView. In those cards, the team's name and their logo should be displayed. I don't have logos as image files in the Room database itself, however there is a column that stores the names of the drawable files in which the team logos are stored. (For example: Team A's logo is stored in the drawable's as 'teama.png' and it has 'teama' stored in a column.)
In the Adapter class of the RecyclerView, I want to use the bind() function to put the name and the logo on the cards. What I'm expecting to do (related to my question overall) is using a function that can take a string parameter ("app:srcCompat="#drawable/teama"") and puts it to the XML file of my team item. Is this possible? I'm open to other solutions as well and can post code if requested.
Thank you for your answer beforehand.

Is there a way to add XML code to an XML file from a Kotlin code?
Yes, but not in the context of what you are asking.
What I'm expecting to do (related to my question overall) is using a function that can take a string parameter ("app:srcCompat="#drawable/teama"") and puts it to the XML file of my team item. Is this possible?
No. You cannot modify the content of a resource XML file at runtime.
From what little I've dabbled in HTML and JavaScript, you could add HTML lines to the HTML file from using a Javascript function in the script.js file and it would add those HTML lines you've written into the function to the HTML file on execution and it would work as if you've written it in the HTML file to begin with.
JavaScript, run in the browser, does not modify the HTML file on the server. It modifies the DOM: the parsed representation of the HTML that is used by the browser to render a UI on the screen.
Similarly, in Android, you will need to update the View objects — created from parsing that resource XML file — to reflect your desired name and logo. This approach is covered in books and courses on Android app development. FWIW, here is a free book of mine on the subject.

Till now this technology is not available and if it is available it's not that famous and in use

filter json results into image path

Hello i am using MIT App Inventor 2 to make an app that runs on an old (spare) android phone to display the folder.jpg of currently playing movie (later on I also want to do that with music).
I can't filter the path to use, for example this is the result of the json:
{"id":"VideoGetItem","jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"item":{"id":1,"label":"2012","thumbnail":"image://F%3a%5cMovies%5c2012%5cfolder.jpg/","type":"movie"}}}
I want to keep: image://F%3a%5cMovies%5c2012%5cfolder.jpg which is the dvd cover (and maybe the label: 2012 which is the title of the movie).
I tried various options like making a list but then I still get text with lot of params between '()'
Can someone help me with this?
Thanks

Use the JSON decode block together with the lookup in pairs block. As you can see, it helps to use Do it...

I have something that is doing it for me for starters.
I see a flaw but that's in Kodi(.tv) itself (I am not a fan of the library system in kodi, so I put a folder.jpg in every drawer of a movie, but sometimes kodi doesn't display it and presents me with a video preview of the movie, I have to sort that out with kodi developers)
For now I am glad I have it working,
solution picture

Parse an RSS feed for Android app ? Is jsoup the answer?

I am reading the Head First Android development book. In the third chapter where they try to make an app from NASA RSS feed from here . In the book the author uses SAX parser for Java. I looked online and some of the answers here on SO suggest that SAX is outdated and there are newer solutions.
However I'm not sure what the easier to use ones are for Java. I have used Nokogiri for Ruby and something similar would be awesome. I looked at jsoup and it looked alright, but I am wondering what suggestions you guys might have.

I'm the author of Head First Android Development, so just wanted to chime in with a few thoughts. SAX is definitely a bit cumbersome, but straightforward and was built into Android for a while (hence the decision to use that in the book). I'm also a rails developer and I'm a big fan of nokogiri and use it often. Looking at jsoup, I could definitely see that being useful. That said, I haven't tried it out, so I can't give any first hand experience with it.
Another option to look at is the XML PullParser built into Android. It's still pretty SAX-like, but a bit more full featured.
Hope this helps.

The code on the chapter 3 halts because Android doesn't support networking in it's main thread.
So you can use any parser like XmlPullParser but make sure you do the networking(downloading the feed etc.) off of it's main thread. You can use AsyncTask to take the networking outside the main thread.. or create a new Thread() and do the networking in that thread (Recommended)
Actually, in the 4th chapter they actually DID create a new thread to do the networking. So if you use the chapter4 code instead then it will work.
Another problem you might face is of OutOfMemoryError because Nasa daily images are really big these days. So you'll have to decode the image with inSampleSize. You can check other questions on decoding an image right to get what you want. Good luck. ))

I'm a big fan of Jsoup. I only recently started using it and its amazing. I used to write some super hairy regex patterns to do pattern matching with because I wanted to avoid SAX like the plague... and that was quite tedious as you can imagine. Jsoup let me parse out specific items from a <table> in just a few lines of code.
Let's say I want to take the first 7 rows of a table where the <tr class=...> is GridItem or GridAltItem. Then, lets say we want to print the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd columns as text and then the first <a href> link that appears in the row. Sounds goofy, but I had to do this and I can do this easily:
String page = "... some html markup fetched from somewhere ...";
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(page);
for(int x=0; x< 7; x++) {
Element gridItem = doc.select("tr[class$=Item]").select("tr").get(x);
System.out.println("row: " + gridItem.select("td").get(0).text() + " " + gridItem.select("td").get(1).text() + " " + gridItem.select("td").get(4).text() + " " + gridItem.select("a").get(0).attr("href"));
}
Its that simple with Jsoup. Make sure you add the Jsoup jar file to your project as a library and import those classes which you need: you don't want to import the wrong Document or Element class...
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
Enjoy!

I think SAX is a default way to acheive it, no boundations on trying something new though :)

Since version 1.6.2, Jsoup officially also supports XML parsing. This thus allows you to parse XML and select elements using jQuery-like CSS selectors. To create a XML document with Jsoup, you need the following instead of Jsoup#parse() method:
Document document = Parser.xmlParser().parseInput(xmlString, "");
// ...
This way the input won't implicitly be treated as HTML5 (so, no auto-included <html><head> tags and so on).

What is the equivalent of Android's Html.fromHtml() in WP7?

Is there a quick and dirty way to render HTML in a textblock in a fashion similar to Android's Html.fromHtml()? I am aware of how to manually parse it with something like the HtmlAgilityPack, but all I really want is for it to render like its source in the textblock.
If not naively then perhaps with a custom control of some sort and, no I don't want to render it as a web page.

Ok sorry it took so long. I all but forgot how to use git correctly and hadn't had the time to upload till now. This HtmlTextBlock offers a similar level of functionality as to that of its silverlight counterpart which is pretty close to the android equivalent. Its still a bit buggy at times when dealing with more complex tags like the html dtd tag but does the job....
WP7 Html Text Block. The design is largely based on this guy's Bringing-a-bit-of-html-to-silverlight-htmltextblock-makes-rich-text-display-easy. and rewriting the web browser related classes using html agility. One day I'll post the details but, blah... Not right now. lol
Update
Example of usage:
<local:HtmlTextBlock x:Name="htmlTextBlock" Canvas.Left="2" Canvas.Top="2" TextWrapping="Wrap" UseDomAsParser="true" Text="&ltp&gtYour Html here &lt/p&gt" />
Note: Your html will have to be escaped such that &lt = < and &gt = >
For detailed usage see:
https://github.com/musicm122/WP7HtmlTextBlock-/blob/master/HtmlTextBlockTest/HtmlTextBlockTest/MainPage.xaml

Trying to pull API into LinearLayout Android APP

I am a beginner of Android apps and am using Eclipse. I have found some larger samples of pulling APIs but I cannot find a simple one to get started with. I simply want to pull from an XML file on the web (by using an API KEY) and throw it in a LinearLayout (Vertical). I can then go from there, anyone know of any? Below is a sample of my XML:
<xmldata>
<Products>
<ProductCode>ITI-GR12</ProductCode>
<ProductName>Granada 9-3/4" Narrow Rim Platter</ProductName>
<ProductPrice>64.4000</ProductPrice>
</Products>
</xmldata>

I am assuming you are looking for mechanisms which help you to parse XML and extract data from it...Voila here is a link to get you started with different ways of doing it...
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/x-android/
Good luck!

your question is not easy as you will have quite a lot of programming to achieve what you want.
Here are the steps :
read your data using sax
fill a data structure of your own (build a
class, data members will be filled by
previous parsing)
build an activity, use a layout you define to
show all UI fields you think you need
to display your data
fill the content of each view using the data
structure you filled on step 2.
If you are a beginner, I suggest you first understand steps 3 and 4, having fun with UIs, then try to understand how you could download your file, parse it and fill some data class to provide content for the views.
Regards,
Stéphane