Fragment Callbacks vs EventBus in Android - android

I have faced with the problem. My Activity is fragment container, so to communicate between activity and fragments I used common Callback approach. In this case my activity has to implement tons of callback interfaces depending on fragment count.
I don't like to hardcode and unreadable code. In my case my class declaration can take several lines to list all interfaces.
I am trying to get rid of this.
There is another approach is to use EventBus pattern.
In activity
EventBus.getDefault().register(this);
In fragment
EventBus.getDetault().post(new MyEvent(description));
And handle several event types in activity.
Maybe there will be better to use EventBus here instead default Callback approach ??
Or maybe there is my fault that my activity is holding a lot of fragments (God Object) and it is better to use activities instead Fragment ?
Please suggest which approach is better ?

For simple one Activity to one Fragment hierarchy, callback is simplest decision to go. But think about Activity containing a Fragment, and the Fragment contains swipe-able ViewPager, and each tab of ViewPager has Fragments A,B,C.
The Fragment A,B,C will go to long journey to send event to mother Activity, and it can be lost interface connectivity between Activity and children when they are restored during crazy complex Android Activity-Fragment lifecycle dances. In this case, eventbus like otto can be a good choice.
The drawback of event bus approach is, it is hard to maintain where the event is come from. So, keeping a few sender is recommended.

Your interface approach is awesome, just keep up with them, and maybe try and slice/make your interface static and add all the little little voids and return methods to that interface so you can just implement one and call the functions.
EventBus? how about LocalBroadcastReceiver ? its a matter of preference and which one you feel will suit you better, after all if you handle 10,000 request and hate having 100 interfaces, you will end up using 1 and nesting 99.
& just forgot, it is better to hold alot Fragment instead of Activity because at the end of the day the Activity lifecycle is pretty hard to maintain second of all you can not really control Activityies well all as compared to Fragments and Fragment is a good slave, serves you better
hope its valuable

Related

Multiple Activities / Fragments and the Model View Presenter pattern

Firstly, I know that with Model View Presenter there are different implementations, and in my mind as long as you have the layers of abstraction clearly defined and doing their appointed roles then how you implement this pattern is open to interpretation. I have been implementing this pattern in quite a few apps where there was just one Activity. I've now started a new project that has multiple Activities and attached Fragments, including nested fragments (ViewPager).
I'm now trying to translate the MVP to this project and I've hit a concept wall and would like some guidance and insights.
So far I've created the above structure and started to do a 1 : 1 relationship with View & Presenter (regardless of Activity or Fragment). I feel that this is OK, however if for example I sent a request to do something from an Activity View to its Presenter, which returns a result to the Activity View how would I go about propagating the result i.e. update all the other Activities/Fragments that are currently not in a Paused() or Stop() state. I feel like in this case there should be a central Presenter that updates all necessary Activity and Fragment Views, but I'm not sure how to go about doing this.
Currently when each Activity and Fragment is created it creates a new instance of a Presenter class, passing in itself as a reference (the Activities and Fragments implement their own interfaces), which the presenter stores as a WeakReference and can invoke the relevant interface methods when returning a result.
According to the docs whenever Fragments want to communicate with one another and the attached Activity you should use a callback interface. With this in mind should I have one callback interface that the Activity implements and the Fragments callback to whenever they request something, so in essence only the Activity would have a Presenter and Model layer that the Fragments have to callback to in order to make various requests?
Sorry if this sounds a bit muddled, hopefully this is clear enough to understand what I want to achieve, and if I’m thinking along the right lines... or totally off the mark!
I think this is okay to have a presenter inside activity. Basically activity is like a controller, it should know about the presenter.
It would be wrong to put a presenter inside a fragment if activity or other fragment needs it too. You can put a presenter inside a fragment only if this presenter is designed specifically for fragment.
which the presenter stores as a WeakReference and can invoke the relevant interface methods when returning a result
Why do you need a WeakReference here? If you have 1:1 relationship then I assume your presenter does not have it's own lifecycle, meaning that it's lifecycle depends on either activity or fragment. There is no risk of having memory leaks because it's not a singleton, right? It should be safe to have a strong reference.
I'm not sure if I answered your question because it looks a bit broad to me. My point is that, fragments are just separated "parts" of activity and you should treat them as parts. If presenter belongs to this part only, then it should be inside. Otherwise it should be in activity. You are right about using an interface to access activity, this is a well-known design approach which Google uses in their examples.
Nope, no interface anymore. You either use RxJava Observables to update all the views as described here or some kind of Bus(Otto-deprecated or EventBus). And you will like it because they make interacting too easy.

Android - Communicating between Fragments

I'm trying to access a function in one Fragment (f1) from another Fragment (f2). It seems that i have to make my function in f1 public and static to be able to access it from f2.
I've read that it's not a good idea to access one Fragment from another, so i've tried to make f2 access my Activity, which then connects to the function in f1. Although, even doing it this way, i still have to make my function in f1 public and static.
I don't reuse the Fragments, i simply have them in a ViewPager for swiping back and forth through the Fragments.
At the moment i have a lot of static variables because i have to make my functions static to access them from other Fragments.
Am i going about this the wrong way? Is there a better way?
Thanks in advance.
You're going down a road of much pain unless you are very controlled about what you do.
First of all, sharing state through static methods and variables is a fairly awful way of doing things, and static members won't be able to access anything in the instance of the fragment. If you really think you need to use static methods, don't bother putting them in the fragment classes. They don't provide an advantage there. Put them in a common class that they all reference.
Second of all, if you're using a ViewPager with fragments, you can't be guaranteed that any given fragment's view hierarchy even exists at any moment in time. This is because ViewPager typically only keeps fragment views alive that are on the current page or on +/- 1 offset from the visible page. So if you need to tell a fragment at offset +2 from the current fragment, you won't be able to make visible changes to it.
Instead, the easiest thing to do is create an object that maintains whatever state you want to share between the fragments, and have them all make changes to that one object. If you need instant changes to other fragments, you can use something like an event bus to have those changes communicated to other active fragments.
What you're trying to do is in general fairly complex. Expect to spend a lot of time designing a correct solution, and be sure to learn how fragments and ViewPager works very well.
You got two questions
1. Am i going about this the wrong way?
Yes, its not recommended to have the methods & variables declared static just to make them used to access from outside of your class.
2. Is there a better way?
Yes, declare the methods as public (but not static) inside its fragments.
From the activity (which is hosting the fragments) get the reference to the fragments using FragmentManager classes methods findFragmentById() or findFragmentByTag() then call the methods.
Sample :
Fragment fragment =
fragmentManager.findFragmentByTag.findFragmentById
(R.id.fragment);
or
Fragment currentFragment =
fragmentManager.findFragmentByTag("fragmentTag");
If you really require both of your functions to be isolated, you can use Broadcasts. Just send a Broadcast from one fragment and have the Broadcast receiver in the other fragment.

Fragment callbacks explosion, how to deal?

I am creating my app with using fragments. I have something like main activity, it has FrameLayout as root layout to hold fragments.
After much thought I have decided to separate my application logic in several parts, for example : MainActivity is responsible for app basic navigation (MainPageFragment, CategoryListFragment, ProductListFragment, ProductDescriptionFragment), AuthActivity is responsible for autherization, registration (SignInFragment, RegistrationFragment, RecoverPasswordFragment).
A little about my app. If you have recommendation or don't agree with app structure, I would be grateful for any critics.
What is the problem, as you can see my MainActivity has many responsibilities. There are four Fragments now but it can be more in the future.
Lets consider next situation. In my MainActivity I have MainPageFragment and this fragment in turn of course has some views. And on click event I need to change fragment, for instance from MainPageFragment to the CategoryListFragment. In this case I have several ways to handle clicks or other events from framgents.
The most common way is to have activity implements callback interface defined in fragment class as nested class inteface. This approach is quite good and easy to use. But what if my host activity has to handle multiple callbacks from fragments, to say more, there can be more than one callback from single fragment, class(activity) declaration starts growing, class body too. What are another possible approaches to solve this problem.
You can handle all clicks, events directly inside fragment (start activity, replace framgent......) you can do this painless, but for me personally callback approach looks better, but maybe there is nothing bad, and I can use this approach.
Use one or several interfaces for getting information from fragments. For example create class CallbackEvent for holding such info as framgentId, eventType .... Using this approach we can reduce interfaces and methods, but Activity class body can become larger in first approach.
Use something like EventBus pattern to communicate between app components via third party service.
Of course there are some other ways to do this, but I have described most popular.
Please suggest, or just explain how to do you solve this problem in your apps, what approach is better, how to built this communication easy to maintain.
I am grateful for any advice,critics in advance.
If your app becomes more complex using the callback pattern will get messy, especially if fragments need to communicate with fragments. I'd only use that pattern for apps with low complexity (activity, one or two fragments).
Clicks, events etc. should be handled inside a fragment if whatever happens stays within the fragment. Don't replace a fragment from within the fragment, that's the Activity's responsibility. It might look easier to just do a getActivity().someMethod in the fragment but this leads to hard to maintain code. You might understand now what it's doing but will struggle in half a year.
This approach looks messy to me too (similar to 1.)
That's the one I'd recommend. I'm using EventBus (https://github.com/greenrobot/EventBus) but there are alternative implementations like Otto (https://github.com/square/otto) and I've never looked back to the times when I used the callback pattern. Using an EventBus decouples the communication between the different components and your code becomes much simpler and leaner. However you need to be careful with that approach since there are some pitfalls. One is that it gets much easier to communicate from any component to any other component which could lead to even messier code than the listener/observer pattern. Another one is that events are asynchronous compared to synchronous listener calls so you need to make sure you're only receiving the "right" events at the right moment in the component's lifecycle. The main advantages of an EventBus approach are IMO:
A message is always an object forcing the developer to code object oriented compared to the more functional listener method calls
It decouples the different components. Publisher and subscribers don't have to know about each other. Decoupling the components will make your code much leaner and easier to read (and maintain).
It can be used by arbitrary components. E.g. I replaced all LocalBroadcastManager calls by EventBus messages (EventBus is MUCH faster that using a LocalBroadcastManager). Being able to communicate between arbitrary components is especially convenient if the components can't access each other directly (like a Dialog and a Preference object)
I have two rules of Fragment - Activity separation.
One is logic. Anything that deals with View (layout expansion, display, listeners, etc) should go inside a Fragment. Important background processes (http requests, file reading, image processing, etc) should go inside Activity. Part of the reason is explained in my second point:
Lifecycle. Activity's lifecycle outlasts Fragment's. Fragment is also fragile it doesn't even retain its views. And this is the reason Fragment should be decoupled from Activity. Listeners and callbacks are tight coupling and they are the cause of countless null pointer exceptions when some process tries to update a View of a Fragment that has called its onDestroyView. Having said this I'd suggest Publisher - Subscriber pattern like Event Bus where you can plan a message delivery in which it gets digested only when a publisher (which in this case corresponds to Fragment's view) is available.
The numerous click listeners you have are related to how you design your UI. Moving code around doesn't really help much, unless you trim down your layouts.

Android best practices for Fragment to Activity communications

I am new to Android Fragment and trying to learn Fragment to Activity communications.
What is the better approach(best practice) in Android for Fragment to Activity communication?
Lets say I have FragmentA and ActivityA.
After my screen popups FragmentA, I would like to perform somemethod(probably UI related) in ActivityA
Here are two(pattern) possible
Solutions:
In FragmentA getActivity and cast the Activity to ActivityA and then call somemethod.
In FragmentA create an interface callback and then implement that callback in ActivityA. Then on the callback, call somemethod.
Which pattern is more common/perfer in Android development and why. Or do you have an even better way to communicate from fragment to activity in Android to share with me?
Any comments, opinions, and suggestions is highly appreciated and welcome. ^^ .
The second solution is the preferred one, because it allows your fragment to be more independent of its hosting activity.
If in the future you decide to put your fragment on a different activity, there are no changes needed on the fragment, and you will only need to implement the interface on your activity.
I'll add a third solution which is using an event bus (Otto for instance), which also works, although some might argue that it makes your code a little less readable.
First method will be a bad practice. Second method will work fine but your fragment is going to be tightly coupled with your activity.
There is one more better approach is to use some event bus library like otto
Using this you can communicate effectively with loose coupling in your activity & fragment.
Your second approach is more flexible. You might not see a huge benefit in one activity and one fragment case. If you have to use the same fragment in another activity, it will most likely break by casting your activity like that. That said, there is nothing wrong with the first approach, but it is just a little restricted.
First pattern is best when your fragment is used only by one activity.
Second approach is needed if you want your fragment to communicate with some other objects not the activity that hosts fragment. If you always want to communicate with hosting activity callback is not needed. Just create an interface and implement it on as many activities as needed. Then in your fragment cast activity returned by getActivity().
MyInterface myInteface = (MyInterface) getActivity();
myinterface.somemethod();
You can even check if activity implements needed interface(s) etc.
The interface approach works fine and is more flexible in so far as it doesn't tie your fragment to the activity directly. One thing you should also consider is how much work the activity might need to do, that is it may end up managing several fragments. This has a tendency to lead to 'fat fragments' as my question here asked when I started using them

Communication among fragment and activity

I'm implementing fragments in my app. Referring to this documentation,
there is written I should use getActivity() to access activity methods but also (in the next paragraph) I should declare an interface in the fragment and let activity implement it.
Now, the second way is used for callback methods like events, but I can also use getActivity().onSomeEventHappened(), can't I?
Could someone explain me the differences? Because I cannot see differences among them.
There is no difference in the end result if you know that getActivity() will always return the type of Activity you expect.
However using interfaces is a good practice because it decouples your Fragments from a particular implementation of an Activity. So later on in the future if you decide to use your fragments with a different activity, all you have to do is have that activity implement your fragments Interface to be alerted of any fragment events.
You should always strive to have decoupled components if you want an application that is easy to extend without side effects.
You can not always simply call getActivity().onSomeEventHappened(). Just imagine this case: You have two fragments, one with ListView and other which shows image based on listItem selected. In second fragment you cannot just call getActivity().onListItemClicked(), because your activity has no such method, but if activity implements interface and catches those event from the first fragment, then you are able to pass info about event to the second fragment and how the right image.

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