Thursday, May 20, 2010

Quick Android Development Tip: Reusing Layouts With Includes

My last few Android development posts have been kind of long (took long to write anyway), so here's a short one...

When you develop websites, you often end up with a lot of pages that all share a certain block of layout or content. You would typically handle this by making a single separate file for that global content and pulling it into the other pages via some sort of include mechanism (virtual include, <cfinclude>, etc.).

Well, you can do the same thing in Android: you can create a separate layout XML file (say, for a header or a menu bar) and then include it in your other layout files, like so:

 

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Defining Other Global Resources in Your Android Application

In my last post, I talked briefly about how the R.java file, a resource file located in the "gen" folder of your Android application project that is automatically generated and updated by Eclipse and serves as a resource map. My example code demonstrated how you could reference layout.xml files via the R.java file and how Eclipse would register the id of the UI objects within the R.java file as well.

I also mentioned that the layout XML files for your Android app are located in a "layout" folder within the "res" ("resources") folder.  There are other folders under the "res" folder as well, and the content within those folders is also registered with the R file, allowing you to access those resources within your Android code.

Here's a screenshot of what the "res" directory of my current Android project looks like:

The first three folders are "drawable" folders where you put any images you want to use in your application. As I alluded to in an earlier post, Android supports different screen resolutions through the concept of density-independent pixels, in that higher-resolution screens have a larger number of pixels per inch than a lower resolution screen (you can read more about how that works on the "Supporting Multiple Screens" page on Android Developer website).  The three different drawable folders allow you to have three different copies of the same graphic (with the same filename), one for high density/resolution screens ("hdpi"), one for medium density screen ("mdpi"), and one for low density screens ("ldpi").  So if I place a copy of a graphics file called "blueBox.png" in each of the drawable folders, I can reference it in my Android code via the filename (minus the extension) like so:

R.drawable.blueBox

...and (unless I've specifically said my application will only work with a certain pixel density) Android will take care of figuring out which copy of the image file it should display.

We can skip the "layout" folder since I've already talked about how to reference layout files in my previous post, so that leaves the "values" folder.

The first file in my "values" folder is colors.xml.  In Android, you're encouraged to record the color codes of your UI elements in this file (which you have to create).  Here's what the XML looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <color name="pageColor">#fff</color>
    <color name="normalTextColor">#000</color>
    <color name="listItemColor">#333</color>
    <color name="goodColor">#009900</color>
    <color name="badColor">#ff0000</color>
</resources>

...so if you wanted to make a view object in your layout have the "pageColor" background (white, in this case), you'd reference it in your layout XML like so:

<ListView android:id="@+id/android:list"
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content"
  android:background="@color/pageColor" />

The "@color" sign tells Android that we're referencing a color name registered in the resource file, so it knows how to retrieve the value. And again, you can reference these color values in your code (in case you want to change the color of an element or some text in response to some change or condition):

mStatusText.setTextColor(R.color.goodColor);

The second file in the "values" folder is strings.xml. As you can probably guess, it's meant to hold string values that you might use in one or more places in your application, things like screen headers or form labels. But it can also be used to define arrays of strings for use in scrollable lists or drop-down controls (like a list of U.S. states). Here's what it looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <string name="app_name">To-Do List</string>
    <string name="empty_list_message">There are currently no items</string>
    <string-array name="priority_choices">
     <item>High</item>
     <item>Normal</item>
     <item>Low</item>
    </string-array>
    <string name="delete_button_text">Delete</string>
    <string name="save_button_text">Save</string>
</resources>

You would reference a string resource much as you would a color resource, using "@string/app_name" as an attribute value in your layout XML or referencing the string programmatically using "R.string.app_name". To reference a string array, however, you'd use "R.array", as in "R.array.priority_choices", in your Android code (I'm not sure if there's a scenario in which you could reference a string array in your layout).

Finally, there's one more type of resource you can define in an XML file in the "values" directory: styles. I haven't used styles in any of my Android projects yet, but according to the "Applying Styles and Themes" page on the Android developer website, you can create a <style> block in XML that sets values for various visual attributes of view objects (size, typeface, font size, etc.) and then apply that entire set of attributes to a view object in your layout.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Interacting With UI Objects From the Layout in an Android Activity Object

In my last post, I promised to show how I would attach my simple example layout to an Activity object and make a change or two.

Here's the layout XML again:

Every Android project contains a "res" (reources) folder, which contains a number of subfolders, including one called "layout." This is the folder where you store your layout XML files. You can only use lowercase letters, numbers, periods, and underscores in your layout XML file name (don't know why, that's just the rule), so I'll call mine example_layout.xml.

Now that that is out of the way, time to start looking at the activity class, which I've called SimpleLayout.  Here it is in its entirety as a screenshot from Eclipse:

Every class file starts out with a package statement and then import statements to import any Android or Java classes you need to use in your activity class. In this case, all of the imported classes are from the Android API.  After the import statements comes the class declaration:

public class SimpleLayout extends Activity (

...which simply says that the SimpleLayout class is a subclass of the Android Activity class, and therefore inherits all of the properties and methods normally found in an Activity object.

After that comes any member variable declarations. Here I declare two private variables, a TextView object called mExampleText and a Button called mExampleButton. They're not assigned a value; they're just declared.

  private TextView mExampleText;
  private Button mExampleButton;

The real action starts with the onCreate method. In Android, when an activity component (a UI screen) is created in memory for the first time, the onCreate method of the activity is called and the code within it is executed. This is when I want to pull in my layout containing your UI objects, so first I make a call to the original onCreate method inherited from the Activity class, and then I call the setContentView method of the Activity class:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.example_layout);

Note the parameter that's passed into the setContentView method: "R.layout.example_layout". The "R" references the R.java file found in the "gen" folder of every Android project. The R.java file is automatically generated and updated by Eclipse and serves as a resource map for various aspects of the project. The moment I created the example_layout.xml file in the "layout" directory, Eclipse added a reference to that file to R.java as an int variable under the "layout" static class, and I can pass that reference to setContentView.

I make use of the R.java file once again in the next two lines:

    
    mExampleText= (TextView) findViewById(R.id.exampleText);
    mExampleButton= (Button) findViewById(R.id.exampleButton);

Now that the layout has been processed by setContentView, I can assign the TextView and Button objects from my layout to the two member variables I declared earlier. Looking back at the layout XML file, you'll note that both the TextView and the Button were assigned id values using the "android:id" attribute:

        
        <TextView android:id="@+id/exampleText"
        ...
        <Button android:id="@+id/exampleButton"
        ...

The "@+id/" part of the id attribute basically tells Android/Eclipse that we want references to these objects added to the R.java file, keyed to the id values provided ("exampleText" and "exampleButton"). So now referencing those view objects in the code of our SimpleLayout class can be accomplished by simply calling for the object by id using the findViewById method (another method inherited from the Activity class).

Now that I have programmatic references to the TextView and Button objects from my layout, I have access to the properties and methods of those objects and can act upon them. The last three lines of the onCreate method basically tells the Button object to change the text in the TextView object when the Button is pressed:

    
    mExampleButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
        public void onClick(View v) {
            mExampleText.setText("Button pressed!");
    }

And there you have it...

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Creating Screen Layouts in Android Using XML

In my last post, I alluded to the fact that you can lay out your visual elements and controls on your Android application screens (your Activity objects) using XML. In this post, I'm going to give you a peek at what that XML looks like.

Here's an example of a super-basic layout XML file:


The first line is a typical XML declaration statement. The next line is the start of a LinearLayout view object, which serves as a visual container for other view objects. The first attribute of the LinearLayout tag defines the XML namespace (that has to be the first attribute of the first view object of every Android layout file you create). This LinearLayout container is set to fill the entire width and height of its parent container. In this case, since it is the main container object, it fills the whole screen. The "android:orientation" attribute is set to "vertical" which means that all of the child objects within the LinearLayout will be arranged vertically, even if one or more objects could fit together horizontally. Seeing the LinearLayout for the first time reminded me of the VBox and HBox layout elements in Adobe Flex, which also uses a domain-specific XML language to define screen layouts.

The second object in the layout (the first within the LinearLayout) is a TextView object, which as you might guess displays text. The "android:id" attribute assigns an id value of "exampleText" to the TextView object. The "android:layout_height" and "android:layout_width" attributes are set to "wrap_content." Normally, that means that the object will only be large enough to contain whatever's inside of it plus any padding, but it won't be in this case (which I'll explain shortly). The left and right padding are set to 5dip (density-independent pixels), a pixel scale used by Android to accomodate the different device screen sizes. The other attributes are fairly self-explanatory except for "android:layout_weight", which is something more easily explained by the examples coming up shortly.

The third and final object is the Button object, and you can guess what it does. Note that its "android:layout_width" attribute is set to "fill_parent", so it will be as wide as the screen is, even if the Android device is re-oriented from portrait to landscape.

Now, here's how the layout looks in the Android emulator that comes with the Android Eclipse plugin:



As I mentioned before, the height and width of the TextView object was set to "wrap_content", meaning that the TextView should be just as wide and as tall as it needs to be to enclose whatever is inside it plus the padding. The width is just long enough to contain the content horizontally, but why is it so tall? It's because of the "android:layout_weight" attribute. In Android, you cannot do percentage-based heights and widths like you can with HTML elements. Instead, you can assign layout weight values to view objects to assign a level of "importance." More important objects take up more of the available layout space, while less important objects take up the remainder.

The default layout weight of all view objects is zero. An "android:layout_weight" value of 1 denotes a more important object, while a value of 2 denotes an even more important object. Right now, both the TextView and the Button have a layout weight of 1, so they take up an equal amount of vertical space (because they are in a vertically-organized LinearLayout). If the Button's layout weight was changed to 0, however:





...then the Button's height gets reduced in deference to the importance of the TextView.

Personally, I'm still getting the hang of using layout weights. Fortunately, I don't have to run the layout through the emulator every time I want to see the results of my latest change to the XML. The Android plugin for Eclipse lets you view layouts either as raw XML or within a graphical layout view that lets you add view objects to your layout via drag-and-drop and see the results of the property changes you make as you make them:



It's not as nice as the layout designer in Flex/Flash Builder, but it's still nice to have.
In my next Android post, I'll show how to attach this layout to an Activity object, and make a few changes to the layout object programmatically.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Android Application Concepts: the Activity

Android applications can be constructed from four different types of components: activities, services, broadcast receivers, and content providers. Of the four, the only one that you must use at least one of in every application (and the only one that I've had to use so far) is the activity.

I'm not going to even try to give a full explanation of what an activity is: the Application Fundamentals page on the Android Developers site provides a thorough (and rather long) explanation of activies as well as the other three components. So I'm just going to list some aspects of activities to give you a conceptual overview of what an activity is:

  • Each individual screen within an Android application is an activity, and users can perform actions by interacting with the visual components within an activity. Think of it as an individual web page within a modern web application, where the user can perform certain functions without leaving the page (using JavaScript), but must proceed to a different page in order to access a new set of tasks/functionality.

  • Each activity operates independently of one another (again, similar to how individual pages in a web application are separate from one another).

  • The visual objects within an activity (blocks of text, input boxes, buttons, etc.) are usually organized and instantiated by implementing instructions within a layout XML file.  They CAN be added individually with regular Java code, but the XML method is the recommended practice.

  • The transistion from one activity to another is accomplished through the use of asynchronous messages called Intents. An intent can be used to pass data from one activity to another, and that data is structured using key/value pairs. It's similar to how data is passed when an HTML form is submitted.

  • Each activity in an Android application is either a direct subclass of the Activity base class or a subclass of an Activity subclass that provides specialized functionality (such as the ListActivity class which contains methods specifically for the display of data in a touch-enabled list), and is represented in the application package as a single Java class.

  • All of the activities in the application must be defined in the application's manifest file, an XML file that keeps track of all of the components, resources, and permissions that make up the application.

  • All Android application components, including activities, have lifecycles. The current lifecycle state of a component provides part of the information the Android OS uses when it determines what components can be safely removed from memory in order to free up memory space. All activities inherit a set of lifecycle methods from the Activity base class that are executed when the corresponding lifecyle state of the activity is reached. These lifecycle methods are:

    • onCreate: the code within the onCreate lifecycle method is called when the activity is instantiated/loaded into memory. This is the method in which you want to set up the intial state of your variables, instantiate the visual objects within the activity via your layout file, and bind your event listeners. If you're a jQuery user, think of it as the equivalent of the document.ready function.

    • onStart: the method called when the activity becomes visible to the user.

    • onResume: the method called when the activity is moved to the foreground of the visible space, when the user is able to not only see the activity but interact with it. After the onResume method is called, the activity is considered to be "running."

    • onPause: called when the activity is no longer in the foreground, usually as the result of another activity being started.

    • onStop: called when the activity is no longer visible to the user in either the foreground or background.

    • onRestart: called when the activity is being restarted (made visible again) after executing onStop but not onDestroy.

    • onDestroy: called just before an activity is destroyed/unloaded from memory.

     

  • Any activity that isn't currently "running" could potentially be removed from memory by the Android OS if available system memory is low. The more inactive an activity is, the better the chance of it being destroyed to reclaim memory, so an activity that is "stopped" is in more danger of being removed from memory than an activity that is "paused."

  • Because even an activity that is "paused" can be destroyed under extremely low memory conditions, it is a best practice to run code to store/save any persistent data within the activity within the onPause method just in case (kind of like how the auto-save function works in Microsoft Office to save your work every few minutes).

  • To preserve the current state of an activity (like filtered search results) rather than persistent data, you can use code in the onSaveInstanceState method to perserve that data in a Bundle object (which, like an intent, stores data in key/value pairs).  The onSaveInstanceState method in the activity is called by the Android OS itself as soon as the activity has the potential to be removed from memory. However, onSaveInstanceState is NOT called when the user explicitly takes action to destroy an activity (usually by exiting the entire application).

  • It is possible for one "application" to utilize activity objects from one or more different application packages (.apk files), given the proper planning and permissions.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Developing Native Android Applications: Not as Hard As You Might Think

Two months ago, my boss asked me to try and build a native Android application based on the mobile website I had created for the university's annual Maryland Day festival. Both he and I are part of an IT initiative in our department tasked with figuring out how best to provide IT services to smartphone users on campus, and while we have in-house expertise in iPhone development, none of us were familiar with what would be involved in building Android applications. So he asked me to give it a shot.

I started by going to the official Android developer site:  http://developer.android.com/index.html. I downloaded the Android SDK per the site instructions, then downloaded and installed the Eclipse plugins for doing Android development, and the files needed to work with the Android API I was targeting in my application. I went through the "Hello World" tutorial, where I learned the basics of starting an Android project in Eclipse, how to configure a simple layout, and how to run the device emulator. After going through a few more of the layout-oriented tutorials, I realized that I was missing out on a few of the concepts being discussed, so I stopped coding and started reading through the development guide pages on the site, where I learned about the different components you can use in Android applications, what they were used for, and how to use them.

After spending the first few weeks just learning from the documentation and the tutorials, I started to focus more of my attention on how to accomplish the tasks I needed to make my particular application work. The developer site didn't have examples that addressed some of the issues I needed to solve, so I starting searching the web. Sometimes I found exactly the answer I was looking for on an Android development forum. Other times, I was able to cobble together an approach based on answers to similar issues on all-purpose tech forums like StackOverflow. I was always able to find at least a clue, something that would point me to the right package in the API documentation. I also had to stray from the Android developer site anytime I needed to learn more about Java coding itself, as it's kind of assumed that the developer is confortable with Java programming (an incorrect assumption in my case).

By the time I was done, I had created a working Android application that:

  • Would check for updated event information at startup by making an HTTP call to an XML page. If the version number on the XML page was higher than the version number stored in the application's database, it would make an HTTP call to a ColdFusion page that output the updated event information as XML, parse the XML with a SAX parser, and update the application's SQLite database with the event data.

  • Provided the user with a number of different ways to find events by interest. Each listing (whether it was a list of events, a list of event sponsors, etc.) would be preceded by a search box, and as the user typed in the search box, the list would be filtered on-the-fly based on the search text.

  • Gave the user the ability to flag an event as a "favorite" by tapping a toggle button on the event detail page, which would update the event record in the SQLite table and allow them to pull up a list of all of their favorite events.

  • Gave the user the option of seeing a satellite map view of where the event was located using the Google Map API, with the event location marked with an particular icon based on what type of an event it was.

  • Gave the user the option of seeing a satellite map view that showed the user their current GPS location on campus and where the particular event was located.  The user's position on the map would be updated as the user made their way towards the event location.

Although it worked pretty well, there were a few minor bugs that I couldn't work out before the festival, and we weren't comfortable releasing it to the public having only been able to test it on particular Android phone model (the Motorola Droid), so it wasn't put into production.

Even though I went into the project with an open mind, I really hadn't expected to be able to build such a full-featured application, not as a first Android application and not with being a Java noob to boot. What made it possible was the excellent documentation on the Android developer site, the development tools within Eclipse (the code hinting/code correction, the automated compiler, the debugger perspective, and the device emulator), and the various tidbits of Android development how-tos out on the web. And thougth there were some moments of frustration, I generally enjoyed the experience.

I don't know how much more native Android development I'll be asked to do at my job, but I plan to create some Android apps on my own time now that I know how. And I plan to start blogging about Android development, not as an expert (I have a lot to learn yet) but as someone who's learning as he goes. So you can expect to see more Android and Android development content on my blog from here on out.

Monday, May 3, 2010

Quick Tip: Removing That Flash of Content Before jQuery Kicks In to Hide It

The focus of the jQuery UI Meetup I attended last week was on jQuery UI 1.8 and to work out some questions regarding future meetups, but of course some other topics came up as well. One of those other topics was the not-uncommon problem of having certain HTML content, meant to be hidden or styled by jQuery, briefly appearing in its raw form before the page has fully loaded and jQuery gets to do its thing. Apparently the term for this phenomenon is "FOUC", which stands for "flash of unstyled content."

Now, if you took it as an absolute that any and all uses of your web page had Javascript enabled, you could solve a FOUC problem by assigning a CSS style to the problem content that hid the content right from the get-go, and then you could use Javascript to reveal the content at the appropriate time. But such a solution would fail if the user had Javascript disabled--the content would never be visible to them--and it's contrary to the idea of progressive enhancement (the idea that the page is usable as is, but is enhanced when Javascript is available).

So in answer to the question on FOUC, Richard Worth (the speaker for the meetup) pointed us to the following blog post by Karl Swedberg:

http://www.learningjquery.com/2008/10/1-way-to-avoid-the-flash-of-unstyled-content

The post provides a pretty good explanation of the technique (which is pretty simple), so I don't feel the need to explain it or add to it. Just thought I'd put it out there because it would be hard to find via a web search if you didn't know how to describe the problem and didn't know the FOUC acronym.