Develop Reference

Wear OS swipe-to-dismiss

I'm developing an app for Wear OS.
It has 2 screens, both extending from AppCompatActivity, both havingandroid.support.wear.widget.BoxInsetLayout as the root of their layouts.
From the first one i can navigate to the second one and in the second screen use left-right swipe to navigate back without problems, i didn't need to do anything for this to work.
For the first screen the same left-right swipe is not doing anything, and i can't understand why, as the documentation says:
An activity automatically supports swipe-to-dismiss. Swiping an activity from left to right results in dismissal of the activity, and the app navigates down the back stack.
Witch makes sense after seeing the default behaviour of my 2nd screen.
I've tried to put a SwipeDismissFrameLayout as the root element of that screen, that make the swipe work, but, instead of showing the watch face that is below, it's showing a gray screen and it's also not finishing the activity (unless i explicitly do it implementing the callback)
From what i can understand in the docs this should be working without having to do anything, but for some reason it's not...
Both activities have the same style and same layout root element.
Is there something i'm missing to make this work?

Android - Navigate back to tabbed fragment

My Action bar consists of two tabs (a list of businesses and a map of businesses). If someone chooses from the list I would like to hide the tabs and show that business' page. If the user hits back, the business fragment is popped and the tabs should be displayed again.
What is the best approach to get this working? So far with the following code I have an inexplicable recursive loop if I pop the business fragment :(
So picture this, I'm displaying the BusinessListFragment tab. I choose a business, swap fragments and in onPause() I set the navigation mode to standard. Hit the back key, and in the onResume() of the BusinessListFragment I have this:
ActionBar ab = mHostingActivity.getSupportActionBar();
if (ab.getNavigationMode() == ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_STANDARD)
ab.setNavigationMode(ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_TABS);
Which is supposed to bring back the tabs, but the app freezes with a loop. The tabs are definitely still present. Maybe I'm doing something else strange in my code (I'm sure I'm not though), or maybe Android does something strange when the naviagtion mode is set?
Edit: I've learnt that simply setting the navigation mode to tabs seems to actually select the first tab - which I believe would explain the recursion. Interesting!

Okay well this took a while to figure out but hopefully this will help future googlers :D
It seems the best practice is to never try and hide / show tabs by setting the navigation mode from within a tab fragment's onResume / onPause, or anywhere within it for that matter.
I therefore set the mode to Standard in the onResume() of the detail (business) fragment. Normally if there are no more hierarchical layers of navigation to traverse from within the detail fragment, it is fine to simply set the mode back to Tabs in the detail fragment's onPause() - accounting for back presses or up presses.
However in my case you can click on elements within the business page to launch another fragment (leaving a stack count of 3), meaning I cannot 'turn on' tabs within onPause(), and found the best solution was to do it within onDetach(). This should mean the tabs are only turned on when the detail fragment is actually popped from the stack.
Hopefully this solution is accurate, I have toyed with many ideas including back stack listeners and overriding onBackPressed, but for me this seems to be the best option.

ActionBar animation does not stop

I am using ActionBar Sherlock with a number of fragments.
The app I am building is a basic RSS reader much like the one shown here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_qR2glTTAs), except that there are multiple tabs for several different RSS feeds. When a tab is clicked, I replace the active fragment with the appropriate new fragment.
I am trying to get ActionBar animated refresh button functionality much like it is depicted in the YouTube video above. Basically, when the user clicks the refresh button, I expect the refresh button to rotate until the refresh is complete. If the user switches tabs while the current tab is refreshing, I want to show a refresh button that is NOT rotating.
The problem is: after I click on the refresh button and the button starts rotating, if I switch to another tab, I simply get a non-rotating refresh button on top of the rotating refresh button! This happens despite my calling menu.clear() and recreating the menu each time a tab is clicked. Interestingly, rotating the device causes the extra rotating refresh buttons to disappear.
Nothing I've tried seems to be able to stop the refresh animation when I change tabs! Any ideas why? I can post more of my code here if necessary.

I think the problem could be that you are animating and / or creating the menu inside your fragements... if this is the case do the things you want to do with your menu in the FragmentActivity
By the way, the effect you experience while rotating the screen is caused by the android architecture. Android always recreates the view if you are switching from portrait to landscape mode or the other way around.

How to keep tab's activities history while switching tabs

In my app I have TabActivity , and 3 Tabs in it. Every tab has some buttons, that changes current Tabs view. I mean when I'm clicking on the button, it changes the Activity in the current Tab, but when I'm going to second Tab and returning to first one, Tab is recreating. I need to keep the Tab unchanged. How to do this?
Also I didn't use fragments because it needs min API level 11
Thanks in advance

Android - Honeycomb - Action Bar tabs and fragments

I am creating an app for Android 3.0+ that uses the action bar with tabs for navigation. I have 2 tabs that each load a ListFragment:
Tab 1 Tab2
A B
C D
Where A & C are list items in Tab 1 and B & D are list items in Tab 2.
Currently if you select Tab2 and then item B a new ListFragment is loaded on top of the current list fragment in Tab2. Pressing back takes you back to the original Tab2 contents. However if you don't press back and instead select Tab1 you see Tab1's contents on top of the new content you loaded in Tab 2. So I am guessing there is a better way of doing this. I wanted to use multiple fragments in each Tab to reduce the code complexity in each tab (for instance the onListItemSelected handling). Is there another way to do that without using multiple fragments? I am also trying to just save state but I am not sure how to tell the difference from when the user clicks back (then I would want to restore state) and the user has selected tab 1 and then selects tab 2 again (i would want to restore state).
Thanks

I am having similar struggles with the complexity of fragments and tabs on the Action bar. It seems to me that android for tablets is still very much in its infancy and there are various issues (like yours and the issues I'm having) that will be addressed in the coming months. For now, I think you just have to handle some of those complexities yourself instead of relying on the Android framework.
To answer your first question more directly, I think you need to step back and think out the functionality before diving into the code. I can give you a potential solution (keep track of your fragments manually in the activity and simply add and remove fragment as necessary via the ActionBar.TabListener interface.
Also, if you want the user to be switching from one fragment to another like you are suggesting, perhaps the back functionality shouldn't be used. What happens if the user clicks on the tabs 10 times in a row. Do you want the back button to take the user back through all of those events? I think the back button should only be used when the navigation system is very sequential and "back" is an easy concept. Check out all the Google apps that use tabs to see what I'm talking about.