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How do I effectively implement the MVVM design pattern for my android app which will also ease writing of test cases? [closed]

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I am planning on implementing the MVVM architectural design pattern for my android app. I have read online that it will help me achieve efficient separation of concerns and easily write test cases for Data model, UI, etc. Need some insight/advice for this.

Well, to learn how effectively use MVVM, begin with Android MVVM Design Pattern Examples
Here you would find that post:
I am the developer of Android-Binding. Like #Brentley said, it's
a very new project but I do hope to get more buzz and experience so
that it can be improved. Back to your question, I have written some
simple introduction/tutorials on MVVM with android-binding:
Android MVVM Tutorials (with android binding)
Introduction to Android Binding (codeproject)
Model Validation in Android Binding (codeproject)
Wiki in project homepage
Potential adopters please also register on the project discussion
group.
Read whole topic. You would notice that MVVM is relatively new framework and it's highly recommended to work with it cooperatively with Google's pData Binding library and dependency injection library like Roboguice or Dagger2...
...but the best would be this one:
Approaching Android with MVVM. Building an MVVM architectured application using the Data Binding Library,
where an author is explaining using MVVM with Data Binding library by example - I mean by his own created app. He concludes:
It’s still too early to know if this approach is the correct way of developing an application, but this experiment has given me a chance to look at one of the possibilities for future projects. It’s something I definitely want to play around with more.
Model-View-ViewModel is interesting because in traditional Android architecture, the controller would push data to the view. You would find the view in your Activity, then set content on it.
With MVVM, your ViewModel alters some content and notifies the binding data framework about changed content. The framework do then automatically update any views, which are bound to that content.
The two components are only loosely coupled through that interface of data and commands.
Next aproach of using MVVM is really testable. From MVVM on Android: What You Need to Know
Because a ViewModel does not depend on the View anymore, you can test a ViewModel without a View even existing. With proper dependency injection for other dependencies, it is very straightforward to test.
For example, instead of binding a VM to a real view, one might create a VM in a test case, give it some data, then call actions on it, to make sure the data is transformed properly. (...) All of this can be done without having to interact with an actual View.
Read also: MVVM ON ANDROID USING THE DATA BINDING LIBRARY
Hope it help

Design patterns for Android [closed]

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I'm working in a new app for Android. Since it is my first time working with it, I don't know how structure it. I'm searching for a nice design pattern to use.
My application will make connections with a WebService and also, will save some information in local.
Which design patterns will be nice for my app?
I saw MVP pattern (Model-view-presenter) but I read it is focused to do tests.

WebService interface
Basically you have two main routes to achieve a WebService interface.
You can use the WebApps way. It is a WebView centered approach, in this way it is more remote-driven: you can upgrade the website css/html and make large changes to the layout and content without requiring your users to upgrade your app on the market.
You can also use the WebWorkers way. It is application/android centered. You use Asynchronous threads to fetch data from the website, on success, they call a Handler in your UI which is responsible for displaying it using a WebView or android widgets (ListViews for example). This is longer to code and (hence) more error prone but you can achieve a much better android integration (using Notifications, background checking, ListView based activities).
Information persistence
This really depends on how much information you want to store and how much you want it to be shareable the android way.
The best (and harder) android integration is achieved with a full-blown ContentProvider whose backend storing is delegated to sqlite. API Demos have nice code samples for this.
For a fixed number of data persistence, SharedPreferences is much simpler.
This article is a good tutorial on android data persistence.
MVP design
MVP is used throughout android framework, this is not a choice really, you have to comply with it whenever you want to use standard widgets ;)

You should read the application/activity lifecycle very carefully, writing code which properly fits into this life cycle limits the use of certain design patterns a lot: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html
And you should really try to fit into this, it really helps to avoid a lot of strange problems :).

Which Architecture patterns are used on Android? [closed]

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I'm doing a small research of mobile platforms and I would like to know which design patterns are used in Android?
e.g. in iOS Model-view-controller is very widely used together with delegation and other patterns.
What patterns and where in particular does Android use?
EDIT
I'm not asking for design patterns used deep in kernel, dalvik and so on, but about patterns which an application developer will meet while developing an application.

I tried using both the model–view–controller (MVC) and model–view–presenter architectural patterns for doing android development. My findings are model–view–controller works fine, but there are a couple of "issues". It all comes down to how you perceive the Android Activity class. Is it a controller, or is it a view?
The actual Activity class doesn't extend Android's View class, but it does, however, handle displaying a window to the user and also handle the events of that window (onCreate, onPause, etc.).
This means, that when you are using an MVC pattern, your controller will actually be a pseudo view–controller. Since it is handling displaying a window to the user, with the additional view components you have added to it with setContentView, and also handling events for at least the various activity life cycle events.
In MVC, the controller is supposed to be the main entry point. Which is a bit debatable if this is the case when applying it to Android development, since the activity is the natural entry point of most applications.
Because of this, I personally find that the model–view–presenter pattern is a perfect fit for Android development. Since the view's role in this pattern is:
Serving as a entry point
Rendering components
Routing user events to the presenter
This allows you to implement your model like so:
View - this contains your UI components, and handles events for them.
Presenter - this will handle communication between your model and your view, look at it as a gateway to your model. Meaning, if you have a complex domain model representing, God knows what, and your view only needs a very small subset of this model, the presenters job is to query the model and then update the view. For example, if you have a model containing a paragraph of text, a headline and a word-count. But in a given view, you only need to display the headline in the view. Then the presenter will read the data needed from the model, and update the view accordingly.
Model - this should basically be your full domain model. Hopefully it will help making your domain model more "tight" as well, since you won't need special methods to deal with cases as mentioned above.
By decoupling the model from the view all together (through use of the presenter), it also becomes much more intuitive to test your model. You can have unit tests for your domain model, and unit tests for your presenters.
Try it out. I personally find it a great fit for Android development.

Update November 2018
After working and blogging about MVC and MVP in Android for several years (see the body of the answer below), I decided to capture my knowledge and understanding in a more comprehensive and easily digestible form.
So, I released a full blown video course about Android applications architecture. So, if you're interested in mastering the most advanced architectural patterns in Android development, check out this comprehensive course here.
This answer was updated in order to remain relevant as of November 2016
It looks like you are seeking for architectural patterns rather than design patterns.
Design patterns aim at describing a general "trick" that programmer might implement for handling a particular set of recurring software tasks. For example: In OOP, when there is a need for an object to notify a set of other objects about some events, the observer design pattern can be employed.
Since Android applications (and most of AOSP) are written in Java, which is object-oriented, I think you'll have a hard time looking for a single OOP design pattern which is NOT used on Android.
Architectural patterns, on the other hand, do not address particular software tasks - they aim to provide templates for software organization based on the use cases of the software component in question.
It sounds a bit complicated, but I hope an example will clarify: If some application will be used to fetch data from a remote server and present it to the user in a structured manner, then MVC might be a good candidate for consideration. Note that I said nothing about software tasks and program flow of the application - I just described it from user's point of view, and a candidate for an architectural pattern emerged.
Since you mentioned MVC in your question, I'd guess that architectural patterns is what you're looking for.
Historically, there were no official guidelines by Google about applications' architectures, which (among other reasons) led to a total mess in the source code of Android apps. In fact, even today most applications that I see still do not follow OOP best practices and do not show a clear logical organization of code.
But today the situation is different - Google recently released the Data Binding library, which is fully integrated with Android Studio, and, even, rolled out a set of architecture blueprints for Android applications.
Two years ago it was very hard to find information about MVC or MVP on Android. Today, MVC, MVP and MVVM has become "buzz-words" in the Android community, and we are surrounded by countless experts which constantly try to convince us that MVx is better than MVy. In my opinion, discussing whether MVx is better than MVy is totally pointless because the terms themselves are very ambiguous - just look at the answers to this question, and you'll realize that different people can associate these abbreviations with completely different constructs.
Due to the fact that a search for a best architectural pattern for Android has officially been started, I think we are about to see several more ideas come to light. At this point, it is really impossible to predict which pattern (or patterns) will become industry standards in the future - we will need to wait and see (I guess it is matter of a year or two).
However, there is one prediction I can make with a high degree of confidence: Usage of the Data Binding library will not become an industry standard. I'm confident to say that because the Data Binding library (in its current implementation) provides short-term productivity gains and some kind of architectural guideline, but it will make the code non-maintainable in the long run. Once long-term effects of this library will surface - it will be abandoned.
Now, although we do have some sort of official guidelines and tools today, I, personally, don't think that these guidelines and tools are the best options available (and they are definitely not the only ones). In my applications I use my own implementation of an MVC architecture. It is simple, clean, readable and testable, and does not require any additional libraries.
This MVC is not just cosmetically different from others - it is based on a theory that Activities in Android are not UI Elements, which has tremendous implications on code organization.
So, if you're looking for a good architectural pattern for Android applications that follows SOLID principles, you can find a description of one in my post about MVC and MVP architectural patterns in Android.

When i reach this post it really help me to understand patterns with example so i have make below table to clearly see the Design patterns & their example in Android Framework
I hope you will find it helpful.
Some useful links for reference:
Common Design Patterns for Android with Kotlin
Introduction to Android Design Patterns
Design Patterns

There are various patterns used in Android framework like:
Broadcast receiver uses Observer pattern
Remoter service invocation uses Proxy pattern
View and view group uses Composite pattern
Media framework uses Facade pattern

Here is a great article on Common Design Patterns for Android:
Creational patterns:
Builder (e.g. AlertDialog.Builder)
Dependency Injection (e.g. Dagger 2)
Singleton
Structural patterns:
Adapter (e.g. RecyclerView.Adapter)
Facade (e.g. Retrofit)
Behavioral patterns:
Command (e.g. EventBus)
Observer (e.g. RxAndroid)
Model View Controller
Model View ViewModel (similar to the MVC pattern above)

The Following Android Classes uses Design Patterns
1) View Holder uses Singleton Design Pattern
2) Intent uses Factory Design Pattern
3) Adapter uses Adapter Design Pattern
4) Broadcast Receiver uses Observer Design Pattern
5) View uses Composite Design Pattern
6) Media FrameWork uses Façade Design Pattern

In the Notifications case, the NotificationCompat.Builder uses Builder Pattern
like,
mBuilder = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this)
.setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_stat_notification)
.setContentTitle(getString(R.string.notification))
.setContentText(getString(R.string.ping))
.setDefaults(Notification.DEFAULT_ALL);

Android also uses the ViewHolder design pattern.
It's used to improve performance of a ListView while scrolling it.
The ViewHolder design pattern enables you to access each list item view without the need for the look up, saving valuable processor cycles. Specifically, it avoids frequent calls of findViewById() during ListView scrolling, and that will make it smooth.

All these patterns, MVC, MVVM, MVP, and Presentation Model, can be applied to Android apps, but without a third-party framework, it is not easy to get well-organized structure and clean code.
MVVM is originated from PresentationModel. When we apply MVC, MVVM, and Presentation Model to an Android app, what we really want is to have a clear structured project and more importantly easier for unit tests.
At the moment, without an third-party framework, you usually have lots of code (like addXXListener(), findViewById(), etc.), which does not add any business value. What's more, you have to run Android unit tests instead of normal JUnit tests, which take ages to run and make unit tests somewhat impractical.
For these reasons, some years ago we started an open source project, RoboBinding - A data-binding Presentation Model framework for the Android platform. RoboBinding helps you write UI code that is easier to read, test, and maintain. RoboBinding removes the need of unnecessary code like addXXListener or so, and shifts UI logic to the Presentation Model, which is a POJO and can be tested via normal JUnit tests. RoboBinding itself comes with more than 300 JUnit tests to ensure its quality.

I would like to add a design pattern that has been applied in Android Framework. This is Half Sync Half Async pattern used in the Asynctask implementation. See my discussion at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_zihWXAwgTAdJc013-bOLUHPMrjeUBZnDuPkzMxEEj0/edit?usp=sharing

In Android the "work queue processor" pattern is commonly used to offload tasks from an application's main thread.
Example: The design of the IntentService class.
The IntentService receives the Intents, launch a worker thread, and stops the service as appropriate.All requests are handled on a single worker thread.

Binder uses "Observer Pattern" for Death Recipient notifications.

Android application architecture - what is the suggested model? [closed]

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In the same way a web or desktop app might have three or n tiers - UI, Business, Data for example - what is the suggested structure for an Android application? How do you group classes together, what layers do you have etc?
I'm just starting Android dev (an internet-based app that must respond to incoming notifications) and have no real feel for the structure I'm aiming at. Suggestions appreciated.

IMHO, Android "wants to" follow a MVC pattern, but view & controller are generally really coupled in activities.
It makes unit test harder and it's hard to obey to the Single Responsibility Principle.
I found a really nice Android architecture presented here, there could be an idea. Everything is loosely coupled, so much easier to test and edit.
Obviously, I'm sure there are a lot of others possibilities (like the MVP pattern (Model View Presenter) - and here are answers talking about MVP in Android), but you should still take a look on it.

I've been working on Android for 9 months now from a server-side background where full unit testing and layered architectures are common and work well.
Through lots of trial and error and I would strongly suggest using the Model View Presenter pattern, not Model View Controller.
A huge issue I've found is that Activities/Fragments have a lifecycle which is outside your control and can lead to unexpected issues.
For example, our main android app wants to be used in landscape mode on tablets. We do this in OnCreateView() or OnCreate().
On a Nexus 7, the default view is portrait so what happens is that it starts the activity in portrait mode, our code then says go to landscape and android ultimately creates the activity class 3 times!
We've hooked up network requests to onCreate and they end up happening 3 times in this case.
Sure, we can add logic to look for duplicate calls but, in my opinion, it would be better, architecturally to try and divide the UI from the business logic.
My recommendation would be to use the factory pattern to create presenters from the activity but make sure the factory only ever returns the same instance. The presenter can then contain logic to do network request, look for duplicates and return cached results and general business logic.
When results from network calls return, either post to a bus such as Otto which the activity (register for the event on onResume() and deregister during onPause()) has registered to, or make sure the callback interface implemented by the activity has been updated to the last activity in the presenter.
This way, code in the presenter downwards is unit testable and not reliant on flaky UI layer testing.

The actions, views and activies in Android are the baked in way of working with the Android UI and are an implementation of a model-view-viewmodel pattern, which is structurally similar (in the same family as) model view controller.
To the best of my knoweledge, there is no way to break out of this model. It can probably be done, but you would likely lose all the benefit that the existing model has, and have to rewrite your own UI layer to make it work.
You can find MVC in the followings:
You define your user interface in various XML files by resolution/hardware etc.
You define your resources in various XML files by locale etc.
You store data in SQLite or your custom data in /assets/ folder, read more about resources and assets
You extend clases like ListActivity, TabActivity and make use of the XML file by inflaters
You can create as many classes as you wish for your model, and have your own packages, that will act as a structure
A lot of Utils have been already written for you. DatabaseUtils, Html,
There is no single MVC Pattern you could obey to. MVC just states more or less that you should not mingle data and view, so that e.g. views are responsible for holding data or classes which are processing data are directly affecting the view.
But nevertheless, the way Android deals with classes and resources, you're sometimes even forced to follow the MVC pattern. More complicated in my oppinion are the activites which are responsible sometimes for the view but nevertheless act as an controller in the same time.
If you define your views and layouts in the xml files, load your resources from the res folder, and if you avoid more or less to mingle this things in your code, then your anyway following a MVC pattern.

MVP is the latest architecute most people are following
Here is the small documentation As Uncle Bob's clean architecture says, “Architecture is About Intent, not Frameworks”
Watch this video it's just mindblowing good.

Here is a dedicated project for Android Architecture blueprints with well documented source codes. All of them are based on the MVP pattern with several twists. Also check the comparison of the various solutions based on lines-of-code, testability, cost of learning, their support for increasing data complexity. It depends on the particularly developed app and the context (time to market, developers, future plans, etc.) which blueprint fits best.

what's design pattern principle in the Android development? [closed]

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I was a JaveEE developer. Recently I joined an Android development team. The structure of Android confused me. The MVC design pattern doesn't seem to suit for Android development. So what is the design pattern principle for Android development? I mean is there any hint about how to write a clean, easy reading and effective Android code.

Android's architecture annoyed me at first, but I beginning to see a method to their madness. It's poorly explained by the android documentation. My biggest gripe has always been that it's hard to have a centralized data model with objects that your Activities share just like a normal application. Android seemed to want me to be a nomad because I could only share primitives between my Activities. And dropping junk in a database is NOT a model because it contains no behavior. So as most people my business logic all ends up in my activity making it hard to share business logic in other activities.
I've come to find out I was missing some key puzzle pieces. Android is MVC. However, it's coupled to the View fairly heavily.
Activity == Controller
Model == Subclass of Application
Anything that subclasses View == View
Interestingly you can create a subclass of Application and declare this in your Manifest file, and Android will create a single instance of this object that lives the length of your application no matter what Activity is destroyed or created. That means you can build a centralized data model there that all Activities have access to.
The way I see this is something like a primitive Spring container that you can initialize objects and resolve dependencies between them. That way you can decouple the model portion of your application away from the Activity themselves. And just have the Activity make calls on the model, and hand callbacks to receive the results so it can update the UI.
The problems with Android is that it mixes controller and view pretty heavily. For example, subclasses like TabActivity, ListActivity imply a certain view being used. So swapping out a view is pretty involved. Also the Controller makes very specific assumptions about what the view is even if you use Activity. He contains direct references to UI objects like TextView, etc. And it registers for low level events like clicks, keyboard, etc.
It would be better if Activity could register for more high level events like "Login", "Update Account Balance", etc which the view would dispatch in response to a series of clicks, keyboard, touch events. That way the controller works at the level you might describe features instead of design features.
I think we'll reach this type of design eventually as we better understand come up with better tools and techniques. It seems like Android might have the extensibility to make this happen, but it's up to community to chart it.

The actions, views and activies in Android are the baked in way of working with the Android UI and are an implementation of a model-view-viewmodel pattern, which is structurally similar (in the same family as) model view controller.
To the best of my knoweledge, there is no way to break out of this model. It can probably be done, but you would likely lose all the benefit that the existing model has, and have to rewrite your own UI layer to make it work.
You can find MVC in the followings:
You define your user interface in various XML files by resolution/hardware etc.
You define your resources in various XML files by locale etc.
You store data in SQLite or your custom data in /assets/ folder, read more about resources and assets
You extend clases like ListActivity, TabActivity and make use of the XML file by inflaters
You can create as many classes as you wish for your model, and have your own packages, that will act as a structure
A lot of Utils have been already written for you. DatabaseUtils, Html,
There is no single MVC Pattern you could obey to. MVC just states more or less that you shouldn't mingle data and view, so that e.g. views are responsible for holding data or classes which are processing data are directly affecting the view.
But nevertheless, the way Android deals with classes and resources, you're sometimes even forced to follow the MVC pattern. More complicated in my opinion are the activites which are responsible sometimes for the view but nevertheless act as an controller in the same time.
If you define your views and layouts in the xml files, load your resources from the res folder, and if you avoid more or less to mingle this things in your code, then you're anyway following a MVC pattern.

Android development is primarily GUI development, which like Swing/AWT in Java consists of lots of anonymous inner classes reacting to GUI events. Its one of the things that has really kept me away from doing a lot with Swing....but I have an Android phone, so I'm going to grit my teeth and just get over it, as many an Apple fanboy has said about the antenna problems. ;)

Android makes the typical decision of making the Controller and the View a single class. This encourages putting too much in the same place. An Activity corresponds to a screen, each View to a region of a screen (sometimes the whole screen), each Controller to the user gestures from that region of the screen, and Models are just Models, sometimes backed by services from Environment or some other crazy little set of utility functions. I use the Activity to coordinate one or more MVC trios. This helps deal with Android's choice to just throw everything in the same place.
I can test the vast majority of an Android app without running the simulator. Big win.

Sorry for my English.
Android has a very good modularity (Activities, Fragments, Views, Services, etc.). So there is no need in MVC.
Of course there is the separation of taking input (Activities, Fragments), logic, view (xml or java) and data (databases, files, preferences). But this is not MVC. You shouldn't try to use MVC, it will only complicate your architecture.
Rather than keeping something in global scope, Android motivates you to keep objects as deep as possible in their scopes (class members, local variables), and pass objects to/from activities, or to fragments, using Intents/Bundles. This is also because of memory limitation.
The system may destroy your activity if the foreground activity
requires more resources so the system must shut down background
processes to recover memory.
So it's not safe to store not-constant (mutable) objects as global (static) objects. Usually you use static for immutable constants.
In simple terms, you separate your application into screens (Activities). Then each screen - into fragments (Fragments). To perform a sequence of actions on the screen you can also separate them using Fragments (example).
So you have very small blocks in your application, each of which you can easily test and reuse.

My impression is that android programming model has lots of similarity with MS WPF.
XML layout definitions, code that is always bound to one of these definitions...
So, if you are asking about design patterns because you want to improve your current or in development android projects, maybe you should look at WPF practices and patterns for improved architecture, like MVVM.
Check out these links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx
there is small project that is already trying similar thing:
http://code.google.com/p/android-binding/
cheers