I apologize if I'm just missing the obvious. I'm fairly new to Android development, and while I searched for this particular topic, I wasn't exactly sure what to look for (in terms of a "name").
In an application I'm writing, I have a section where the user can enter the names of players. However, this can range anywhere from 1 to whatever, no limit. However, I'm not sure what the best approach for this kind of feature is, or if there's a component that already does something like it.
Basically, the functionality I'm looking for is similar to what you can see in the Edit Contact screen of the phone book; for the phone numbers and email addresses, you can push a little plus button to add a new number/address, or hit the little minus button to remove a number/address.
I can think of several ways to potentially implement this, but in the end I think wrapping it in a custom component would be best (so that you could call "Get Players" and have it return a list of strings by going through each of the inputs and getting the values).
Am I just overthinking this? Is there a component that does that already? Is there some example code that demonstrates a good way to do this?
Thanks!
Could you just use ListView and add a menu with a "Add Players" option? You could customize the list view to have a little checkbox, for example, and then begin the game by pressing the menu ... or add new players dynamically by pressing another menu button.
After playing around with some ideas, I came across a solution that I think will suit what I'm doing. I created a custom component extending LinearLayout. As part of the creation of the component, it creates a row that says "Add new..." with a plus-sign button. Pressing the plus sign button then creates a new row containing an EditText and a minus-button which will remove the row.
I then created a method for this component called getTexts() which returns a List that has all the non-empty Text values from all the components. Testing it in a dummy app, it seemed to work fine.
I think I need to make tweaks to make it more robust (like the ability to add rows programatically, listeners to alert other components when a row is added/removed, and the ability to set the individual EditText values, for instance), but this functions as I imagined.
Related
The issue I've been running into is creating an AlertDialog popup that includes multiple EditTexts and Buttons, while also including the usual positive and negative buttons. With an additional '+' Button that would create another 'set' of EditTexts and Buttons below the previous one.
A visual example.
I would also like to do this programmatically, if possible. The issue I've been running into is setView(), it seems like that method is meant to be used for only one sort of Button, EditText, or otherwise to show on the screen. But as I need more than one, and calling that method more than once just overrides the previous call, I've become stuck. The only thing I can find that might be it is ViewGroups but I haven't been able to find a way to work with it.
Any information on this would be immensely helpful!
Before that I start explaining the problem I need to say one thing: I'm totally new to android programming, I can use java without problem, but i still don't know the android packages and classes.
I have a LinearLayout with 2 columns, inside the first column there are some buttons, the second contains a scrollView, in this scrollViewthere should be some... items that the user can add, those items have a title and a text, i already defined thoose objects in another class, and i add them to the scrollViewfrom a button.
From now i put in that object a button that is used to delete the item, but now i realized that it's really ugly, so i was thinking: is it possible to allow the user to drag and drop the item out of the screen to delete it?
I could surely do it by managing the event of pression and release on the item with some listener, but i'm almost sure that there's some android class created for sliding UI components.
Something like what you do with android notification.
I post an image of how the current app is so you can understand better what i said: http://i.stack.imgur.com/fHWK3.jpg (I don't have enough reputation to post images)
If i wasn't clear just say and i will edit with the requested information.
UPDATE: After reading the resource that Bonatti posted in his answer i added a OnLongClickListener for starting the drop, and a OnDragListener to look the cordinates during the drag, now i have a problem... I need my component to be dragged only horizzontally like how you usually remove notification from the notification bar, i thought about the fact that i could save the Y-location of the shadow created by the DragShadownBuilder when i create it, and then i could check in the OnDrag event if the Y-location now is different from the beginning i correct it, but the problem is... how can i access the shadow's location?
The basics of what you are asking for can be found here:
I cant post more than 2 links, so redo these:
http:// developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/ drag-drop.html
These other might help with what you need in details:
Link 1: code.tutplus Or Link 2: vogella
They both answer what you need.
To put it simple:
You need an "action" to receive that a button/something was pressed (and that is still being pressed), and then update the screen to match the item position
I need some way to edit an item in my multi-line ListView - and it's just two text fields that need editing.
What would be the best way, design-wise, go about this? I feel that a whole new activity would waste too much screen space and look off, yet just a popup with the two fields and some confirm button might look off as well.
It's pretty subjective as to what's the best design for this, especially without knowing more about your specific use, however there are definitely a few possibilities that come to mind.
The new activity option that you noted is actually quite standard. You can see a similar paradigm used in Gmail, Google Talk, Messaging, etc. If your text fields expect to have something like a single word in each though, I can understand how that might feel like a waste of space to create a new activity. I wouldn't necessarily rule it out though; you can probably play around with styling to make it feel less empty (include labels, short descriptions, etc.). Also consider that most users nowadays have soft keyboards. That can take up a significant amount of space and make the view feel less empty.
The popup option seems less standard, but again if you styled it correctly I could see it working OK. What don't you like about this option?
Another option is to do a multi-pane layout of sorts which is far less common for a phone-sized layout but not out of the question. You could have a pane with two text boxes which is for the current item above your list view and have the contents change when you select an item in the list view. This is also a less standard UI.
You could also have an alternate view actually within the list item. In addition to your current (I'm assuming) two TextViews, you could have two EditTexts and maybe an OK and cancel button that are hidden. The visibility of all of these views would be toggled when you select the item.
There are more options too, I'm sure, but hopefully this will give you a little to think about at least.
I would use a separate activity for several reasons:
1) It's what users would expect. I can't recall any apps that use a pop up to edit contents of a listview
2) It'll be much easier to manage state in a separate activity e.g. when a user starts to enter some text and then gets interrupted by a call or email notification etc
3) If you're editing text then the keyboard wil take up most of the screen so you're activity won't look sparse.
you need to update in list view and add more items in list view???????
I'm interested in hearing what you guys think is the most efficient/solid object-oriented design for a simple multiple choice quiz.
Basically, the app presents a series of questions with 4 choices each. If the choice you selected is correct, then a new activity will display some congrats and full details behind the correct answer and if you're wrong it'll say you got it wrong, along with the details, etc.
After that, the user goes to the next question. On each new question, you'll see your score so far. So maybe you get 50 points for each correct answer, something like that.
Here's how I thought about implementing this: Create a custom view with some radiobuttons or some other widget that could be used for choosing an answer. The custom view takes a Question object, which is just a regular old java object, with fields for choices 1-4. Then, in the custom view, I can set the text of the radiobuttons to the choices from my Question object.
So in my activity it would look something like Question myQuestion = new Question("string for choice 1", "string for choice 2"...)
And then..
Use the question with my custom view. QuestionView myView = new QuestionView(this, myQuestion);
Ok so that's all great. I'm just wondering if I'm setting myself up for trouble. For one, I've got to keep track of the score across all the question activities. Does it make sense to have all of my questions subclass some, mostly empty, activity that I create which can have a counter in it that gets incremented anytime the user gets an answer right (i.e in my superclass activity int scoreKeeper; and in each activity that subclasses this activity: if(choiceIsCorrect) scoreKeeper++). This will allow the score to persist across the activities. I realize I could hold a score between activities by passing and extra to each new activity and then simply adding to it, but that doesn't really seem to make sense to me.
Sorry for all of the blabbering..but I guess my questions are: what do you think is the simplest design for this? Also, in general, I always assumed that you should always use a new activity whenever the user is doing a "single, focused thing"...as the Android paradigm states. But sometimes it feels weird to create so many activities. I know the fact that "it feels weird" is no reason not to do it, but when does it make sense to simply reuse on activity (e.g. in this case, just swapping in a new question in my activity and updating the UI accordingly) as opposed to starting a new activity?
Also, a more detailed question - what would be a smooth way to set which choice (e.g. which radiobutton) contains the right answer, so that when the user presses submit, I can check if they have the right answer and yes/no then react accordingly?
To summarize:
What is a straightforward, object-oriented way to create a succession of multiple choice question activities?
What's the most sensible way to keep track of the score?
Does each question necessarily need to be a separate activity? (And, in general, how do you guys approach the question of whether something ought to be a separate activity?)
Also, kind of a particular: what's the easiest way for me to flag which choice is the correct one so I can check to see if the user got right? I know that with a radiobutton, for example, you can use onCheckedChangeListener and retrieve which radiobutton is currently checked, but I'm not sure how to use that in my design to check if the user got it right...
Thanks!
I would not make the "correct/incorrect information activity" its own activity. Instead, when the user selects a radio button choice, and then clicks an "OK" button, a Dialog should pop up. When they close the dialog, there is a button there to advance to the next question.
I would say you should do this all in one activity.
I'm going to use one activity with a ViewFlipper for cycling through questions.
I'm new into android and i'm dealing with the following problem. I need to create a button which groups another two buttons of similar features (sort of submenu). So let's say we have a button called "search", by clicking on it the search button should disappear and the two buttons (e.g. "google" and "bing") should be seen on the screen.
So, my idea was to manage all three buttons programmatically in the same layout instead of creating a new (temp)layout just to show and handle the two buttons. Like a state machine. More precisely it would be like this:
We press on the "search" button.
onClick(View) determines wheter we are on the main screen (mode=mainmenu), renames the search button to "google" and creates the second button named "bing", or (mode=submenu) then call the function of the button due to the search button is already renamed to "google"...
By pressing the back button onBackPressed() checks if we are in the submenu (mode=submenu) then hide the "bing" button and rename "google" to "search", otherwise we are in the main menu (mode=mainmenu), finish the activity.
Does this make sense at all? Besides this will produce lots of code with rising count of buttons and (sub)menus and worse maintainability for further changes.
Thanks!
P.S. Sorry if my english sucks (not my native language) ;-)
That's too much code and too much debugging will be needed, so I think, a better way is just creating a new layout.
Well if you have performance issues or expecting performance issues can arise (due to complexity of you GUI) then may be this make sense. But if not, code simplicity is more important than slight increase in performance.
You can create an button that remain invisible(gone, to be exact) until the "search" button is pressed, and rename the original search button. It works, and it will be easier to implement if you set up layout in xml. It also give you a preview that shows what it looks like. To show widget programmatically will have code that hard to maintain.
However, the design that change button text is not a good design. First, when the "search" is pressed, changing its text is very confusing. I personally suggest you to pop-out a selection dialog. Or just show both search button at first place, unless you really do not have place for two button.