Complex navigation, view stack in Android - android

Could someone please point me to the right direction in terms of managing complex navigation flow in Android application.
The use case is as follows: User may click on a thumbnail in a grid of thumbnails, this takes user to "detailed" view of an image. This detailed view in addition to details of particular image has list/carousel of "related" images to the image. User clicks on one of related and taken to "detailed" view of that image. And so on and so on.
This basically creates a stack of unlimited/unknown length.
By hitting "back" button user is taken to previous view.
The task: I want to be able to set some limit to the views stack. So for example if user has navigated to 10-th "detailed" view - they will have to hit "back" only 3 times to get to grid of thumbnails where they have started the whole flow.
I am using fragments in my application.
Would really appreciate any help.

I'd use 2 activities. One activity shows the grid, the other the detailed view. The detailed view maintains a stack of previous images, with max length 3. When a related image is pressed, you push the current image onto the stack , dropping the oldest if needed. Then redisplay for the new image. Override onBackPressed to pop the image from the stack. If the stack is empty, call finish() and you'll return to the grid.

One suggestion i would say is not Open a new Activity for "detailed" view .Instead just refresh the activity with the new supporting data.This way there would be only 2 activities in your activity stack.In case you would want atleast the last 3 detail pages then override back button and maintain a stack of 3 images to show the details page.

Related

parentActivityName is not working as expected

I have 3 activities in sequence.
Order Details Screen -> Images List Screen-> Image View Screen
For Order Details, I didn't provide parentActivityName
For Images List Screen, I provided
android:parentActivityName=".activities.OrderDetails"
For Images View Screen, I provided
android:parentActivityName=".activities.OrderDetails"
But when i click back button while in Image View screen, it is still taking me to the previous activity only (Images List) which is in the Activity stack generally.
Whereas I was expecting it to come back to OrderDetails Screen because I mentioned android:parentActivityName=".activities.OrderDetails".
I would like to know why it is overriding the parentActivityName, and how to make it work as expected.

What is the best way to pass data between fragments in to and fro situation with crash handling

I am new to android development so forgive if i asked a silly question. Below i am narrating my requirement and the solution I thought of please read and help me if you have any solution.
In my application i have a activity that contain a toolbar on top, different options in the bottom and in the center area a framelayout where i will load fragments that will render different advertisements(Mostly images) based on the options the fragments using viewpager shows multiple images. Check the following image.
Now my problem is let's assume i selected Fashion option with featured sub option then title should be changed to Fashion-Featured and Fragment should show images related to Fashion>featured let's call this fragment fragment1. Now if the user tap on an image then the application will render another fragment lets call it fragment2.
In the fragment2 the selected image will be rendered in large with two buttons More and Stores. Here if the user taps on more button then the thumbnail images of fashion>featured option will be displayed so that user can select another image. If the user taps on store button then the another fragment will load let's call it fragment3.
In fragment3 the stores selling that particular product will be listed.
Now my problem is how can i pass the data between activity to fragment1 then fragment1 to fragment2 then from fragment2 to fragment3 so that the if the user press backbutton still the fragment2 should show the fashion>featured images with the tapped image on large and if the user press another backbutton then fragment1 should show fashion>featured option images. The data passing should be fail safe that is if the app goes in the background then come to foreground then also it should work.
Please help me out. I am planning to implement using sqlite database and reference in shared preference. I think this is not an exceptional requirement other application also handles this kind of requirement so i need a better way to achieve this.
If you would like to pass some data to a new fragment see this answer: How to pass a variable from Activity to Fragment, and pass it back?
If your fragment is already created you can add some method to it and call this method with required argument.

Implement some functionality like in Instagram android app

There are two things which I like on the Instagram for Android app and I'd like to implement them in my app.
1. Infinite go back in history of fragments
If you tap on a user, you can see his details, taping on followers will return a list of followers, pressing on another user will show his details... and so on. Basically you can do this thing for many times BUT when you go back everything is instant without loading. How can this be implemented? My initial thought was to have only one activity with a top actionbar and for the rest use fragments (one fragment for user details, one fragment for users list) and so on. The problem is I can't think of a good way to allow going back in history. The only way I can see is by caching all the data (user data / list adapters) is an ArrayList so when the user presses back, take the last item from the list and instantiate the fragment. Is there a better way of doing it ? I'm thinking I could start a new activity for each user interaction and them when the user presses back, simply finish the current one. My only worry in this case would be running out of memory. Is there a way to cache fragments with their state ?
2.GridView inside ScrollView
On user details there are two main layouts: a layout with user details and a gridview of images. When the user scrolls, at the scroll's end, the gridview gets new set of items (load as you scroll). While I know how to implement load as I scroll for the gridview, I don't know how to add the gridview inside a scrollview and keep listening for scroll events
Haven't got a quick answer for number 2 but for the first question why not just add the fragments to the backstack with FragmentTransaction.addToBackStack ?
That way you get the natural back-action with fragments without having to start new activities for every action.

display large string into multiple pages in single activity

I am very new to android development. I am trying to create a simple two activities based ebbok type application where activity1 is table of content and activity2 displays the details. I have a listview in Activity1 where I list the table of content. On clicking any specific content, I load activity2. In onCreate of activity2, I load the content into a string(from a txt file in assets). and display that in textView (as defined in activity2.xml). So far so good. The challenge now is to display the content page-wise because, as of now all of my string gets loaded into a single page in activity2. So I added two buttons at the bottom of activity2 (defined that in activity2.xml). My planned logic now is
get the screen height (I could get that)
get the botton height and substract 2) from 1). Now I cannot do this becuase I cannot get button height in onCreate of Activity2
and then find how much text I can fit in one page, find number of pages accordingly, use a page index and using a page delimiter, keep loading remaining text into next pages when user clicks "next" button.
So i need help with
-how to get button width as I have mentioned in 2)
-and any sample code you can share to perform 3) above will also help me.
any help here from any one of you experts out there will be much appreciated.
Using Fragements will Solve your problem.
Fragements :
A Fragment represents a behavior or a portion of user interface in an Activity. You can combine multiple fragments in a single activity to build a multi-pane UI and reuse a fragment in multiple activities. You can think of a fragment as a modular section of an activity, which has its own lifecycle, receives its own input events, and which you can add or remove while the activity is running (sort of like a "sub activity" that you can reuse in different activities).
For example, a news application can use one fragment to show a list of articles on the left and another fragment to display an article on the right—both fragments appear in one activity, side by side, and each fragment has its own set of lifecycle callback methods and handle their own user input events. Thus, instead of using one activity to select an article and another activity to read the article, the user can select an article and read it all within the same activity
For More About fragements just go through this link.
Hope it will help you.
I figured out a much efficient way to display a long string across number of pages. -I display the long text into the text view and disable scrolling -I then find out the lines in the layout and lines on single screen, hence I know how many screens(pages) will the long string span across -Then whenever user clicks a button to go to next page or swipes screen to go to the next page then I use TexView.scrollTo() function to move to number of lines(as many on a screen) forward. So it becomes as good as moving to next page

How to swipe to same Fragment but with other data:?

I'm building this application where I have 2 activities. Both of them consist of 3 fragment - one for title, one for content and one for tab control. It is shown at image below.
First activity serves for showing list of some data's headers (item name etc.), search, app info etc. When user presses item in list, app takes him to another activity to show him detail of chosen item. This "details" activity has 6 different content fragments and user switch between them via buttons in tab control fragment (I did switching between content fragments by showing chosen one and hiding all others - I don't know if it's right way, it's my firs app so it came to my mind at first :) ).
And what I would like to do is: When I'm in detail and I swipe left/right then I want app to take me to previous/next item's detail, to same fragment where I currently was in (so not to next content fragment, but to detail of next item in 1st activity's list).
Is this somehow possible please? Because I have totally no clue how to do it :)
And what I would like to do is: When I'm in detail and I swipe
left/rigt then I want app to take me to previous/next item's detail,
to same fragment where I currently was in (so not to next content
fragment, but to detail of next item in 1st activity's list).
If you want to swipe left-right then you would need a ViewPager widget. I'm not sure how should your details activity behave so I'm providing you with two options. Do you want to be able to switch to the next/previous item's details only when a certain fragment is the one currently viewed by the user(from the 6 content fragments, which I assume are related and show various data for a single item)? If yes then in that desired fragment you would replace the current content of the fragment(which will only act as a container) with a ViewPager and use nested fragments for the actual content. If the user switches to the details of a previous/next item's details and then suddenly wants to see the data for that item from one of the remaining 5 content fragments then you would need to have some updates method on them to refresh the data to show the current item(a OnPageChangeListener will be useful here).
Second option, is if you want to allow the user to swipe left/right from any of the 6 content fragments. If this is the case you would use the same method as above but you'll modify each of those 6 fragments.
Showing the next/previous item is easy, just get some sort of identifier of the data(a position, id), retrieve the whole used data(as in the first activity) and then cycle between it.

Categories

Resources