My application consists of tabs using Tabhost and Activity group. It is working well for now. However, I am told to extend the app to support tablet. The current app seems to work in tablet, with less space utilization. I am told to use split views in few screens.
As a result, I made a rigorous study on extending the design. One proposal is to use fragments. This eventually necessitates a major design change and consumes more time. The other one is to tweak the existing code to extend support which is far less recommended.
The app is aimed to support all Android versions above 2.2
Could anyone guide me a better solution?
EDIT:
I am already using new layout naming conventions.
layout-sw600dp
layout-sw800dp
For current smartphone version, say for instance, a screen has list view as
Item A
Item B
Item C
Tapping any item opens a new activity in the activity group showing the details.
But in tablet, the above two features are brought to a single layout using split view.
Item A |
Item B | Item details
Item C |
I am stuck with implementing the above feature. Can I use fragments inside ActivityGroup?
Related
I m new to Android development and stuck with design. I d like to design a single activity application with multiple fragments. But whatever I consider, I m stuck with design.
I first considered fragments as components or widgets that I could organize where I wanted on my screen. But a single activity has only one xml view layout and can not find a solution.
Here is what I want.
UI design
The problems are the following.
The layout choice: I need a layout for full screen fragment screen 1 but another splitted one for other screens.
The keyboard: if I do a fullscreen fragment layout for all my screens with a (game-keyboard) fragment and (dico-keyboard) fragment, how do I remove the keyboard in dico fragment on tablets ? And can I share keyboard code between both fragments ?
I saw that calling setContentView during runtime is kinda annoying as you have to reassign your variables and is not suitable.
All the applications I find are fullscreen single fragment on layout allowing libs like ViewPager. I can not find an example of composed screen with fragment components.
What layout would you chose, with what kind of fragments ?
Or do you know a library that allow composing fragments as widgets on screen ?
Thanks for your help.
Welcome to Android. Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
First, you should spend some quality time with the Android Developer Guides.
Developer Guides | Android Developers
The insight for your particular challenge is that layouts are resources, and and you can have a layout resource that changes based on the configuration.
So for example, you could have a resource like layout_main with one XML file for small devices and a different XML file for large devices.
App resources overview | Android Developers
Create alternate layouts | Support different screen sizes | Android Developers
You can arrange fragments on a layout using the Android Studio layout designer.
You can add Fragments and navigate.
First of all yu need a navigation: In the left hand side on Android Studio you can find the Resource Manager Then click to Navigation then click to + and choose the Navigation resource file
After this you can add fragment to the navigation:
New Destination (green +) (Don't forget to give name to your fragments).
After this you can add the navigation to your activity's xml. You should use the app:menu=”#menu/bottom_nav_menu” code in your xml
Here a video about the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chso6xrJ6aU
In this article http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/tablets-and-handsets.html
we use res/layout/main.xml with one fragment for handsets and res/layout-large/main.xml with two fragments for tablets. We must check if second fragment is in the layout to define if app runs on tablet or on phone.
I have 4 layout (2 for phone and 2 for tablet):
layout-port
layout-land
layout-sw600dp-port
layout-sw600dp-land
I check screen orientation to define if display is in portrait or landscape mode and check if layout contains a fragment to define if it is tablet or phone.
Is there any better way to work with layouts and fragments?
Is it possible to use one layout if we have two fragments for example http://i.stack.imgur.com/FtzKs.png and if a phone display doesn't fit both of them to show only the first one?
Thanks in advance! :)
What you're showing there is indeed possible! That is something called a Master Detail Flow (if you're developing in Eclipse with adt, check out he new activity wizard, which provides this as a template option).
This layout is basically just two fragments inside an activity (or, now, as of android 4.2, they can be nested in another fragment as well!) that interact with each other in a certain way. To create the layouts you linked to, one would detect whether the device is a phone or a tablet, and then set the visibility of the two fragments in different situations accordingly.
You will find a number of methods for detecting screen size here, whether you want to use screen size in inches, pixels, or the manufacturers' default categories.
And properties like visibility and sizing can be set programmatically using Layout Params and its various subclasses.
In any particular case, whether you choose to use multiple layouts to support different screen sizes or to do more of it programmatically is up to you. Personally, I think that it is always a good practice to design your code modularly and then use layouts to put all the pieces together (it'll save you a lot of headaches down the line if you decide you want to change things up). But either way, supporting more devices will always require more code, and there are no two ways around that...one of the curses of android development :P
I have an existing app that is using a Dashboard style pattern where there's a main menu, and clicking icons on the main menu drive start different activities... In order to navigate to a different function, you need to go back to the Dashboard menu and select another icon.
I want to change my application to a tabbed format similar to the one below with Icons:
What type of View is being used below? Is this a FragmentActivity? Also, what is the best approach to go about conversion? I have a bunch of layouts with listviews in linear/relative layouts... Will I be able to reuse any existing code? I want also to be able to use the solution with Android 2.1 and up if possible.
Thanks!
In the image you provided, it looks to be a TabHost that is used (which can be within a normal Activity or a Fragment Activity) and will be available for Android 2.1 and beyond when using the Android Support library. Based upon your description, you most likely have an Activity per each of your items that you will probably want to convert into a different Fragment. This may take a little time, but a Fragment is very similar to a normal activity in many ways, so once you start getting used to it, converting over the old Activities should be a breeze.
If you plan on using these tabs and you follow the Android design UI guidelines, you may want to use the TabHost in conjunction with a ViewPager. There is a great tutorial for this online that also allows for backward compatibility (down to at least 2.1) found here: http://thepseudocoder.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/android-tabs-viewpager-swipe-able-tabs-ftw/
Support library for fragments/viewpager: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.html
More info about a TabHost and using Tabs with fragments can be found here:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TabHost.html
http://thepseudocoder.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/android-tabs-the-fragment-way/
You can use TabLayout and a TabActivity to achieve layout in picture. Bad news is these are deprecated as of Android 3.0. Google advises to use fragments instead of these.
I have divided my layout into half, left side is having all the buttons.
Right side of the layout should show the button clicked activity.
I am using android 2.2, this is particularly for extra large screens as in small screens main activity would have just buttons,clicking on buttons would take to new activity but for extra large screens all of these images and buttons looks very small, so now divided the layout left for buttons and right for rendering those particular activities.
Any pointers or code examples would be really helpful.
Tried fragments in android 2.2 but fragments only work after android 3. So looking forward to your reply.
thanks.
The Fragments api was backported almost immediately after it was released. Use the information in the following blog post from the Android Developers blog to use this library in your apps that support API versions less than 3.0
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/fragments-for-all.html
EDIT
Here's a better link with pictures and more detailed instructions
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android/android-compatibility-working-with-fragments/
I have an Android app that I would like to convert to an Android library. The app is based around one activity whose entire XML layout contains only a webview that covers the entire screen. The library UI (really, just the webview) must now be integrated into the layout of other apps. For example, one parent app has a tab structure. I would like to have the library webview displayed in one of the tabs, with the tabs always visible at the bottom of the screen. Ordinarily, I'd opt to set the app-library boundary at the activity level but that does not work in this case -- we cannot pop up a new Activity from the library because that would cover all of the screen and the tabs at the bottom.
What is the best way to convert this to a library so that it works within the tab structure of the parent app? Where should the app-library boundary be? Some of my ideas are:
Let the library user create an activity with the custom layout that he prefers (tabs in this case). Make sure that the layout contains a webview. Use findViewById to get the webview object and pass this object into the library for the library to use to display pages. Main disadvantage here is that parts of the library need to hook up some Broadcast receivers onto the parent activity (which is not really part of the library in this scenario), and this coupling seems rather dubious.
Perhaps use fragments which were introduced in Android 3.0. However, these mostly seem geared towards tablets. Would these work in this case?
Is there another option compatible with Android 2.1+ that I am not aware of?
I decided to go with Fragments, using the compatibility library.
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/fragments.html
http://developer.android.com/sdk/compatibility-library.html
Fragments are really the best choice in this case because:
They have a life cycle similar to that of activities, making conversion easy.
They are a chunk of UI with related functionality, which is exactly what's needed in this case.