Android partially active Activity - android

I have an activity A. I am creating a kind of tutorial for user for this activity, to teach him how he can use the app on that screen.
For that, my requirement is :
I want to blur all the views of the activity except one view. I want to prompt user to click on that view through a hand image pointing at that view.
Nothing should happen if the user clicks on the blurred/greyed out area, but if he taps on that particular active view, it should react to that touch.
I was thinking of using a full screen fragment for this. The Fragment will take the following input from the activity :
for what coordinates, is should not blur the screen and pass the touch event to the activity
the coordinates on which it should show that pointing hand image.
After from these coordinates, the fragment background would be blur.
I wanted to confirm if that's possible, to make the fragment partially active, i.e. delegate it's touch events to the activity for a particular view of the activity.
Also, please let me know if there is any other better approach of achieving the same thing.
Edit1 :
Thinking of using a fragment here, because I'd want this type of behaviour on different screen in future. In that case, I'd make that fragment generic which takes some inputs (as described above) and use it on different screens.

There's a very good library called SCV which does what you're trying to achieve, you're able to customize the styles for it too. I've used this for first time the app is opened to show the user a tutorial.
According to their Github
The ShowcaseView (SCV) library is designed to highlight and showcase specific parts of apps to the user with a distinctive and attractive overlay. This library is great for pointing out points of interest for users, gestures, or obscure but useful items.
Further Reading:
Android Arsenal - Showcase Views Tutorial
ShowCaseView on Android - Indipendev

I found it much easier to include an 'extra' layout around the UI of my activity, and then to add a highest-z grey mostly-transparent filter to it and put the instructions on that.
Each "step" of the instructions was a different layout that was dynamically loaded into that layout container as they clicked. (Just another approach)
The 'container' layout is a: FrameLayout
then in my Activity I have: (ignore bad naming)
private void addOverlayLayout() {
frameLayout = (FrameLayout) findViewById(R.id.framelayoutInner);
frameLayout3 = (FrameLayout) findViewById(R.id.framelayout3);
frameLayout3.setBackgroundColor(Color.DKGRAY);
frameLayout3.setAlpha(0.3f);
// Dynamically create a relativelayout which will be appended to framelayout
relativeLayout = new RelativeLayout(getApplicationContext());
relativeLayout.setLayoutParams(new RelativeLayout.LayoutParams(ViewGroup.LayoutParams
.MATCH_PARENT, ViewGroup.LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT));
instructionOverlays.add(createSimpleClickInstruction(R.layout.instruction_reader_1));
instructionOverlays.add(createSimpleClickInstruction(R.layout.instruction_reader_2));
if (FullscreenReaderActivity.isFirstRun) {
displayNextGuide();
}
}
public void displayNextGuide() {
// clean relative layout if it has views
relativeLayout.removeAllViews();
// clean frame layout if it has child (safe if empty)
frameLayout.removeView(relativeLayout);
if (!isFirstRun) {
return;
}
if (instructionOverlays.size() > 0) {
runOnUiThread(instructionOverlays.get(0));
instructionOverlays.remove(0);
} else {
frameLayout3.setBackgroundColor(Color.TRANSPARENT);
frameLayout3.setAlpha(1.0f);
}
}
public Runnable createSimpleClickInstruction(final int resource) {
return new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
getLayoutInflater().inflate(
resource,
relativeLayout,
true
);
relativeLayout.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
#Override
public void onClick(View v) {
displayNextGuide();
}
});
frameLayout.addView(relativeLayout);
}
};
}

Related

Can we provide the navigation to different parts of a single image

We are developing an Android application where the requirement is to have single image having different navigation when the different parts of the image are clicked. E.g. A full image of a building and clicking on the different flats we want to show the amenities offered in the flat ( build up area, number of rooms, number of balconies, terrace (if pent house) etc).
Have thought the following two possibilities,
Slice the images and put together (such that it look as a single image) in layout xml, once user clicks it, with the image view id we will know which portion is clicked.
Slice the images and put together (such that it look as a single image) in html with onclick event, load the html in webview, create JavaScript class that handles clicks.
With above two it is difficult because the parts are not proper rectangle or square shaped.
ASP.Net has ImageMap control for this purpose, do we have anything of that sort in Android?
There is no such component to do this in android, but you can easily create one:
public class ImageMap extends ImageView implements onClickListener
{
List<Rect> hotspot;
public ImageMap(Context c)
{
super(c);
hotspot = new List<Rect>();
setOnClickListener(this);
}
public void addHotSpot(Rect r)
{
hotspots.add(r);
}
public void onClick(Event e)
{
int currentPosition = 0;
for(Rect spot : hotspot){
if(spot.contains(e.getX(), e.getY()))
triggerClickInHotSpotAtPos(currentPosition);
currentPosition ++;
}
}
public void triggerHotSpot(int hotspotIndex)
{
//TODO do something useful like calling listener for this given hotspot etc ...
}
}
be aware that is not a finished work, but its more like pseudo code, the important is you got the idea.
You could do this with a single ImageView by tapping into its onTouch event handler.
See the MotionEvent documentation for specifics on how to get coordinates of the touch event.

WebView appears as plain white box after the second time it's been initialised

EDIT: tl;dr: WebView appears as white box, even though I appear to be setting it up correctly, and indeed it does work the first two times, but fails subsequently)
EDIT: Video showing the problem in action...
I have the following bit of code which inflates a view (Which contains a WebView) from the xml which defines it:
private void createCard(ViewGroup cvFrame, Card card) {
//... setup vairables...
cvFrame.clearDisappearingChildren();
cvFrame.clearAnimation();
try {
View cv = LayoutInflater.from(getBaseContext()).inflate(R.layout.card_back_view,
cvFrame, true);
cv.setBackgroundDrawable(Drawable.createFromStream(mngr.open(deckName + "_Card_back.png"), deckName));
TextView suit = (TextView)cv.findViewWithTag("card_back_suit");
//...setup text view for suit, this code works fine every time...
WebView title = (WebView)cv.findViewWithTag("card_back_title");
//This WebView doesn't appear to be the one which actually appears on screen (I can change settings till I'm blue in the face, with no effect)
if (title != null) {
title.setBackgroundColor(0x00000000);
title.loadData(titleText, "text/html", "UTF-8");
} else {
Log.e("CardView", "Error can't find title WebView");
}
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e("CardView", "Error making cards: ", e);
}
}
When this method is called as part of the onCreate method in my Activity, the WebView contains the correct code, and is suitably transparent.
I have a gesture listener which replaces the contents of the ViewGroup with different content (It animates the top card off to the left, replaces the contents of the top card with card 2, puts the top card back, then replaces card 2 with card 3)
//Gesture listener event
ViewGroup cvFrame = (ViewGroup)findViewById(R.id.firstCard);
cardLoc++
cvFrame.startAnimation(slideLeft);
(onAnimationEnd code)
public void onAnimationEnd(Animation animation) {
if (animation == slideLeft) {
ViewGroup cvFrameOldFront = (ViewGroup)findViewById(R.id.firstCard);
ViewGroup cvFrameNewFront = (ViewGroup)findViewById(R.id.secondCard);
createCard(cvFrameOldFront, cards.get((cardLoc)%cards.size()));
createCard(cvFrameNewFront, cards.get((cardLoc+1)%cards.size()));
TranslateAnimation slideBack = new TranslateAnimation(0,0,0,0);
slideBack.setDuration(1);
slideBack.setFillAfter(true);
cvFrameOldFront.startAnimation(slideBack);
}
}
When the animation has happened and I replace the contents of the cards, the TextView suit is replaced fine and the code definitely passes through the code to replace the WebView contents, but for some reason I end up with a white rectangle the size and shape of the WebView, no content, no transparency.
If I change the WebView to a TextView, it's contents is replaced fine, so it's an issue that occurs only with the WebView control :S
Can anyone tell me why / suggest a fix?
It turns out the WebView doesn't get cleared down when using the LayoutInflater to replace the contents of a ViewGroup. The other controls all seem to get removed (or at least the findViewWithTag() returns the right reference for every other control). I've just added in the line cvFrame.removeAllViews() immediately before the LayoutInflater does it's stuff and that fixed the issue.
If anyone has any better explanation for this I'll throw the points their way otherwise they will just go into the ether...
By calling findViewById, you are getting a reference on the previously loaded webview do you ?
so the loadData call that fails is the second one you make on a single webview instance.
you may want to check this :
Android WebView - 1st LoadData() works fine, subsequent calls do not update display
It appears that loadData() won't load data twice... you may want to try WebView.loadDataWithBaseUri()
Hope that helps.
I had a similar problem loading several WebViews content.
It was because of a misusing of the pauseTimers function
The situation was : the first webView weren't needed anymore, conscientiously I wanted to pause it before to release it. Calling onPause() and pauseTimers()
pauseTimers being common to any web views, it broke every use of webviews occuring after that, there were displaying only white rectangles.
Maybe its not your problem here, but it's worth checking your not calling WebView.pauseTimers() somewhere.
To confirm your answer, the source code for LayoutInflater.inflate(int resource, ViewGroup root, boolean attachToRoot) does in fact internally calls root.addView() which attaches the newly inflated view at the end of the root's children instead of replacing them.
So the mystery now is why did your call to findViewWithTag() is returning the expected objects for your other widgets (which would be the top, most recently created instances), but for your WebView it was returning something else.
Is it possible that there is another object in your layout XML which shares the same "card_back_title" tag?
I was also wondering why you didn't use the more common findViewById() instead, but I am not sure whether it would make a difference.

Transparent InputMethod for Android

Trying to make an Android InputMethod that is transparent - i.e. the underlying content shows through to the keyboard that I am developing.
I've been able to make the View that I pass to the system transparent - I think - but there seems to be something underneath my view that is solid white - and obfuscating the underlying content.
It is definitely possible, these guys do it:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aitype.android.tablet.p&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5haXR5cGUuYW5kcm9pZC50YWJsZXQucCJd
I figured it out! Not sure if this is how the guys in your play store link did it, but this is what worked for me. Also, I realize this post is over a year old, but I'm still answering it just in case someone else out there discovers this when trying to create a transparent keyboard.
The "something" under your view is actually nothing - it's empty space. Your keyboard pushed the entire view up and out of the way to make room for its height, leaving empty white space behind. Your transparent keyboard let this white space show through.
Here's the solution: instead of returning your view in onCreateInputView, return it in onCreateCandidatesView. That's the view that normally lives above the keyboard and lists the autocorrect suggestions. But you're going to use this to house your actual keyboard.
The reason you want to have your keyboard be a candidates view is because the input view most often pushes the underlying view up. Individual apps can decide how they want to behave when a keyboard is shown via android:windowSoftInputMode and the input view respects their preference, but the candidates view always uses adjustPan.
From the docs: "Note that because the candidate view tends to be shown and hidden a lot, it does not impact the application UI in the same way as the soft input view: it will never cause application windows to resize, only cause them to be panned if needed for the user to see the current focus." http://developer.android.com/reference/android/inputmethodservice/InputMethodService.html
So, return your transparent view from onCreateCandidatesView, return null from onCreateInputView and make sure to call setCandidatesViewShown(true) so your candidates view shows up (I call it in onWindowShown).
Normally InputMethodServices uses background color which is same with current binding application's background color. If you want to make this transparent, I think you should make it as popup-window structure, not an inputmethod window I think.
It may such easy to make the full screen keyboard layout extra area transparent via java reflection only if you're quite familiar with InputMethodService.
the extra area has an id name fullscreenArea, you can fetch the area's id, then findViewById() then set its background.
the keyboard look as this before I done my practice :
a giant blank cover the below page.
so after is :
you can see the below page which contained an EditText and others displayed.
here is my code :
public static void makeKeyboardTransparent(InputMethodService service) {
try {
View decorView = service.getWindow().getWindow().getDecorView();
final int viewId = fetchInternalRId("fullscreenArea");
View fullscreenArea = decorView.findViewById(viewId);
if (fullscreenArea != null) {
modifyView(fullscreenArea);
return;
}
} catch (Exception e) {
}
try {
Class<?> superClass = service.getClass().getSuperclass();
Field fullscreenAreaField = superClass.getDeclaredField("mFullscreenArea");
fullscreenAreaField.setAccessible(true);
View fullscreenArea = (View) fullscreenAreaField.get(service);
if (fullscreenArea != null) {
modifyView(fullscreenArea);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
}
}
private static void modifyView(View fullscreenArea) {
fullscreenArea.setBackgroundColor(Color.TRANSPARENT);
}
private static int fetchInternalRId(String name) throws Exception {
Class<?> rIdClass = Class.forName("com.android.internal.R$id");
return rIdClass.getDeclaredField(name).getInt(rIdClass);
}
I provided two approach to make the blank area transparent, both of them worked fine in my test, all you need is pass your InputMethodService into makeKeyboardTransparent() and see what it can do.

How to make a ViewFlipper behave like a Scroller?

Good day everyone.
I am creating a calendar component, and I'm working in the month view. I have created a view named MonthView, and I am adding a couple instances of this to a ViewFlipper:
viewFlipper = new ViewFlipper(getContext());
viewFlipper.addView(new MonthView(viewFlipper.getContext()));
viewFlipper.addView(new MonthView(viewFlipper.getContext()));
I have implemented the fling gesture so that I change views when sliding my finger left or right. This will cyclically update and display the months.
Now, I need to give the fling gesture a smoothly effect when touching and slowly sliding my finger. The same we get when we use a Slider instead a ViewFlipper.
The problem with Scroller is that the effect is not cyclic. Once I get to the last view, I have to slide in the other direction.
I need someone help me find how to give a scroll-like effect to the ViewFlipper, or how to make a Scroller cyclic.
Thanks in advance.
Extra comment:
I have already implemented a ViewFlipper with 2 views. I update the views by using the SimpleOnGestureListener.onFling(...) method, and the behavior I got is something like this:
Imagine I always slide from rigth to left, like flipping a book's page to read the next one, and also imagine there is a caption in the header of the view that is displayed after flipping.
View # 0 --> Caption: January 2011
View # 1 --> Caption: Febrary 2011
View # 0 --> Caption: March 2011
View # 1 --> Caption: April 2011
View # 0 --> Caption: May 2011
If at this point I slide from left to right, the result will be something like:
View # 1 --> Caption: April 2011
View # 0 --> Caption: March 2011
The ability to cyclically move forward or backward, giving the user the idea of having infinite views, but using only a couple is characteristic of ViewFlipper, and that's what I can't loose.
That's why I need a way to add the cool scroll effect without loosing what I've got.
Thanks.
Then you can use ViewFlinger!
viewflinger this an android widget (extends ViewGroup) that allows to group a set of views that can be swiped horizontally. It offers a smoother transition that cannot be accomplished using ViewFlipper. This is based on the Workspace class on the iosched project, which is based in the class with the same name of the Launcher app.
Download: 1.0.2 | Sources | JavaDoc
If you use Maven, you can use it as an artifact from this repository: http://mvn.egoclean.com/. Also, you would want to look this video where I show how it looks like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqIXq5x7iLs (sorry for my accent which sucks)
I think what you wanted to do is create an apparently infinite list of layouts being flinged by either the ViewFlipper or Christian's ViewFlinger. And also you want to keep reusing views / layouts inside the Flinger / Flipper. Right ?
If yes, probably the following is what you wanted to do. I've done this based on Christian's ViewFlinger,
Here you go,
First add three layouts to the ViewFlinger:
<com.egoclean.android.widget.flinger.ViewFlinger
android:id="#+id/calendarViewFlipper"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
<ScrollView
android:id="#+id/calendarViewLayout0"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
</ScrollView>
<ScrollView
android:id="#+id/calendarViewLayout1"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
</ScrollView>
<ScrollView
android:id="#+id/calendarViewLayout2"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent" >
</ScrollView>
</com.egoclean.android.widget.flinger.ViewFlinger>
Then inside your activity, you take an array of three views so that you can access them directly through the array instead of searching every time inside the flinger,
private ViewFlinger viewFlinger;
private ViewGroup layouts[] = new ViewGroup[3];
private boolean userEvent = false;
#Override
public final void onCreateSub(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
setContentView(R.layout.your_layout);
viewFlinger = (ViewFlinger) findViewById(R.id.calendarViewFlipper);
layouts[0] = (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.calendarViewLayout0);
layouts[1] = (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.calendarViewLayout1);
layouts[2] = (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.calendarViewLayout2);
viewFlinger.setOnScreenChangeListener(new ViewFlinger.OnScreenChangeListener()
{
#Override
public void onScreenChanging(View newScreen, int newScreenIndex)
{
}
#Override
public void onScreenChanged(View newScreen, int newScreenIndex)
{
if (userEvent)
{
ViewGroup tempLayout = null;
if (newScreenIndex != 1)
{
// We don't want our actions to raise events and create a cyclic event chain
userEvent = false;
if (newScreenIndex == 2) // Scrolling towards right
{
tempLayout = layouts[0];
viewFlinger.removeViewFromFront();
viewFlinger.addViewToBack(tempLayout);
layouts[0] = layouts[1];
layouts[1] = layouts[2];
layouts[2] = tempLayout;
// Any other logic comes here...
}
else if (newScreenIndex == 0) // Scrolling towards left
{
tempLayout = layouts[2];
viewFlinger.removeViewFromBack();
viewFlinger.addViewToFront(tempLayout);
layouts[2] = layouts[1];
layouts[1] = layouts[0];
layouts[0] = tempLayout;
// Any other logic comes here...
}
// We switch the screen index back to 1 since the current screen index would change back to 1
viewFlinger.setCurrentScreenNow(1, false);
userEvent = true;
// And any other logic that you'd like to put when the swapping is complete May be fill the swapped view with the correct values based on its new location etc...
View result = refreshView(tempLayout.getChildAt(0));
if (result.getParent() != tempLayout)
{
((ViewGroup) result.getParent()).removeView(result);
tempLayout.removeAllViews();
tempLayout.addView(result);
}
}
}
}
});
}
I hope this is clear to you and helps you with your problem. It is working very fine for me! Should work fine for you too.
P.S. Thanks # Christian for the ViewFlinger, it is awesome. However it lacks some good onConfigurationChanged logic, if you get time do put something in :). The rest is the best !

Finding if first image is subset of second image

I am writing Instrumentation tests for my android app. One thing I want to do is to find whether all the UI components are on the screen or not. For that I have taken the screen shot of the complete screen and then I am looking for a particular widget in that image.
This code need to be running on the device only, not on desktop.
E.g. the full screen shot (image-1) have various android components like textview, button, listview and a image. Now I have a subset of this image (image-2), suppose the image of the button.
How can I find that whether image-2 is part of image-1?
Assuming that this code is happening from within the application, it doesn't seem like image comparison is the easiest way to determine whether a view is visible.
If you are writing an external instrumentation application of some sort, and this answer doesn't apply, please let me know.
Here's what I would do to test for the presence of UI elements from within the app:
From the Android API docs on the View object: you can find a view by its ID that was set up in the XML file:
<Button
android:id="#+id/my_button"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="#string/my_button_text"/>
In the App:
Button myButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.my_button);
Then, check the getVisibility() and getGlobalVisibleRect (Rect r, Point globalOffset), both documented on the View doc page.
Pseudocode:
int[] viewIds = {<known ids from xml>};
foreach(int viewId in viewIds) {
View v = findViewById(viewId);
if (v!=null) {
bool isVisible = (v.getVisibility()==VISIBLE) && getGlobalVisibleRect(new Rect(), new Point());
// do something with the visible/invisible info
}
}

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