Implementing NavigationView in android - java

i am working on a project and i happen to implement the "NavigationView" from the Google's Design Compat Library. But i ran into this problem where when an item is touched: i want it to change the activity.
So, what i am implying here is that can anyone give me the best solution of how i can implement this the right way like it is seen in the GMAIL app, where only the toolbar's title and the items in the List also changes.
I tried:
switch(menuItem.getitemId()){
menuItem.setChecked(true);
case R.id.navigation_item_1:
startActivity(new Intent(MainActivity.this, Feeds.class));
But the result isn't what i wanted, Please can you help me.

The comportement you describe (i.e. keeping the actionbar and other stuff), take advantage of fragments and not activities : each time an action is clicked, the displayed fragment is changed, but the activity is still the same one.

Related

For supporting different screen size why should i use fragment in android instead of activity

I am beginner to android..I am started new android project..for supporting
different screen size..in fragment documentation they given to use fragment..but
why cant i use activity in android..if i use activity or fragment..which i should i use in this both..please dont give link of activity or fragment..please anyone answer me..i dont know which to use?...i want about all documentation they given about activity and fragment but i dint understand which to use..below is the link i read about fragment..if i use activity i should do more codings?
https://developer.android.com/guide/components/fragments.html
In fact you can't use a Fragment alone, Fragments are inside the Activity.
One point of using the Fragments for supporting different screen sizes is the ability to implement some views like a "Master/Detail" view.
A Fragment, as its name says, is a part of a bigger controller "the Activity", its reference can be removed and it's cleaner than having a big massive Activity to handle all the states of a view.
So the use case is completely depends on your project and its User Interface. I'd be glad to help you if you give me more information about your project and its design.
I think you will need at least one activity. And then for better handling different device rotations and screen sizes you can use one or more fragments inside this activity.
I try to explain this with an example:
You want to create a nice music player app which should look nice in portrait and landscape mode.
You split your app up into three fragments:
Here you can see how the app looks in portrait mode. The activity shows two fragments: The first fragment only consists of a listview. There the song titles are listed. On the bottom you can see the second fragment, which displays the song title of the current playing song and got a button for pausing the music.
When your user uses the music player app on a tablet in landscape mode you have more space for displaying stuff. Then the activity shows the list fragment (which also gets displayed in portrait mode) and it shows a third fragment which shows detailed information about the current playing song (e.g. the album image) and a progress bar.
By using fragments you only need to write the code for the list once.
Sweet and Simple thing, What i recommend is always use Fragments,
But for Fragment you will require Activity.
Take it in this way , Activity is a Canvas on which you can put any number of Fragments.
Whatever your UI is always use Fragment present on a activity if you want to show one screen even then also, So that you will always have Flexibilty to use all those cool things which fragments provides,maybe in future or in current.
If you use activity it has limits,FOR EXAMPLE, LIKE in INSTAGRAM AT BOTTOM, It has FIVE OPTIONS, Suppose THOSE OPTIONS ARE ON A ACTIVITY AND BY CLICKING ON THEM YOU CAN SWITCH TO DIFFERENT FRAGMENTS.
For more info:
Here is the most accepted answer for this topic.

How can I animate the opening of a secondary android activity? as on playstore news

Although I do know how to open another activity quite easily, using intent like the below:
Intent intent = new Intent(first.this, second.class); intent.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_REORDER_TO_FRONT);
intent.putExtra("selectedApp", ApplicationTitle.getText());
startActivity(intent);
When you use the android application "PlayStore News", when you select a news item rather than just being redirected to another activity. An animation occurs, where in the change between several small cards to one large occurs.
How can I accomplish this?
http://www.mysamplecode.com/2013/02/android-animation-switching-activity.html
There is a method
overridePendingTransition(R.anim.push_up_in, R.anim.push_up_out);
You might want to check out https://developer.android.com/training/material/animations.html#Transitions
This explains how to define custom transitions between activities. In particular, you may be interested in shared element transitions. I'd be more specific, but its a fairly broad question
Check this sample code for animation while switching activities in android.
http://android-er.blogspot.in/2013/04/custom-animation-while-switching.html
http://www.mysamplecode.com/2013/02/android-animation-switching-activity.html

Android Development, Google Tutorial

I am following the Google tutorial for building your first android application. I got to the point where I needed to implement the actionbar actions with the functions openSearch() and openSettings().
I implemented all of this in the MainActivity.java file.
My question is this:
In the example app you can type a message and then send it and it displays it in a second activity. In the second activity, the top action bar changes and does not display my Search icon or perform the action when the settings button is clicked. In order to have these icons displayed in the action bar for this activity as well, do I need to add those methods and update onOptionsItemSelected method in DisplayMessageActivity.java as well as in MainActivity.java? Is this the only way to carry the action bar icons/actions over? To retype the same methods in each activity that you want them in? Or is there a better way to do it?
My other somewhat related curiosity is this. The method openSettings() is called when I click the 3 vertical dots and then settings. These 3 vertical dots show up on every activity, and settings is always in the list. However clicking settings obviously doesn't perform the call to openSettings() when in the DisplayMessageActivity and not MainActivity. How is it that settings and the vertical dots are carried over?
Second to last, how can I add other selections to the drop down list from the options/vertical dots in the action bar? Settings is always there although it responds differently in each activity which was my first question. But I would like to add certain things to the options menu that are on all activities, and some things that are unique to some activities. I assume there must be a better way than repeating switch statements and methods in every Activity.java file.
And finally, what is the best practice to implement an action bar over multiple activities?
Obviously different activities will often have different icons/actions in the action bar, however some things like the 3 vertical dots(options) and settings within that would obviously be acceptable to have in every Activity, while it would be nice to add other things to the options list I don't see why settings should ever change across activities. Yet as I stated before the method is not called in DisplayMessageActivity unless I repeat the code in DisplayMessageActivity.java that I had added to MainActivity.java. I'm confused as to where I can add these so that they are displayed on all activities without repeating code. And I'm confused as to how the actionbar's options/vertical dots are carried over to all activities while others require the repeating of code in each activities' java file that I want them to show up in.
I know this was a bit of a long winded quesiton, I will clarify if necessary. I'm just a bit confused. I was able to make it through the tutorial fine as I have a decent understanding of java. However google's guide isn't written that well and the Android environment is very confusing to a beginner.
I do understand how things work to a degree, I just want to ensure that I'm actually doing it in a way that when my app grows in complexity it won't be a mess of unnecessarily repeated statements and methods.
Thanks in advance for any assistance and tips.
In order to have these icons displayed in the action bar for this activity as well, do I need to add those methods and update onOptionsItemSelected method in DisplayMessageActivity.java as well as in MainActivity.java? Is this the only way to carry the action bar icons/actions over? To retype the same methods in each activity that you want them in? Or is there a better way to do it?
That is certainly one solution, but as you obviously know, it's not a very good one. There are at least two alternative solutions:
Create a MenuActivity class which implements all the logic for common menu items and then extend this class from all of your activities, rather than extending the standard Activity class.
Use fragments to implement your UI. Fragments are similar to activities in that they create UI elements from an XML layout. One difference is that they live inside a "host activity". In this particular case, the host activity will provide the common menu functionality and each fragment can customize it further depending on your needs.
How is it that settings and the vertical dots are carried over?
Most likely your DisplayMessageActivity overrides onCreateOptionsMenu() and inflates a menu XML layout which was created by Android Studio (or Eclipse?) when you created the activity class.

Implementing Instagram like in-app navigation system on Android

I have to implement a navigation system similar to the one used in the Instagram Android client.
There should be a permanent tabbar on the bottom of the screen all the time.
When the user navigates deeper within one of these tabs, lets say to a detail view, then switches to another tab, and then switches back to the previous tab, the last shown (deeper) detail view should be shown, and on back presses, it should be iterating back till the main view of the said tab.
What I have came up with so far is the following:
I have a MainAcitvity showing the menu on the bottom.
On selecting a menu point, the appropriet Fragment is shown.
When the user navigates further within a Fragment, it then asks the MainActivity to change its content by the given criterias, resulting in changing the Fragment shown.
I add all the Fragment changes to the backStack, by calling the FragmentTransaction's addToBackStack() method.
I am stuck at this point, and cannot figure out how to switch fragments on back presses, and how to handle tab navigations when deeper views are shown instead the main views of the tabs.
I am thinking of using my own separate "backstack implementations" for every tab. When the user navigates deeper within a tab, i generate a unique "tag" and use that tag when calling addToBackStack() and also putting the tag in the "backStack" implemented by me. In case the user navigates again to this tab, i can check if i have any tags in the "backStack" for that tab, and if so, then look up that entry in the real backStack in the fragmentManager of the MainActivity, and switch to it.
I could not come up with anything better yet. Is there any better/simpler way to attchieve the said behaviour? Am i missing something? (I know this is really bad application design in the Android world, but it is another question)
I am posting an answer since the question is pretty dead, yet the conclusion might be helpful for others.
We ended up sticking with the old fashioned NavgationDrawer pattern, which worked well. But in the meantime I had to implement a library project which provided a Fragment to the hosting Application which had its own custom logic. This Fragment then used its ChildFragmentManager, to add another Fragments inside itself. ChildFragmentManager is ported back in the Android Support v4 lib, so you can use it basicly everywhere.
So lets say you want x Menu points in which you can navigate deeper. Those will be the Fragments using their own ChildFragmentManagers to add other Fragments to navigate deeper within that Menu. ChildFragmentManagers have their own back stack, so you dont have to worry that much about handling states. If another Menu is selected, you can look up the corresponting Fragment in the MainActivitys FragmentManager, and change back to it, or add it if it has not yet been added.
Be careful, you have to implement back functionality yourself, since ChildFragmentManagers will not get the backPressed event automatically. You can do this by handling the onBackPressed event in your MainActivity.
#Override
public void onBackPressed() {
boolean handled = false;
if(getFragmentManager().getBackStackEntryCount() == 0){
// No menu added
return super.onBackPressed();
}
Fragment frag = getFragmentManager().getBackStackEntryAt(getFragmentManager().getBackStackEntryCount() - 1);
if (frag instanceof XMenuFragment && frag.isVisible()) {
FragmentManager childFm = frag.getChildFragmentManager();
if (childFm.getBackStackEntryCount() > 0) {
// pop the last menu sub-Fragment
childFm.popBackStack();
handled = true
}
}
if(!handled){
super.onBackPressed();
}
}
I used a different code, so it might contain errors, but i hope that the point of the concept is clear.

Architecture for a drawer layout app

I am building an app with a drawer layout similar to the Android Facebook app. I am wondering what the best method for architecture is. Should I have a main activity which is responsible for the action bar, and then have it use fragments to display the content of each menu item, or should I be using one activity to manage the action bar, and then have each menu item kick off entirely separate activities?
I could also imagine building multiple activities, which each have to manage the action bar. This option seems the worst.
You have two architecture options here
MainActivity with Fragments
ParentActivity that handles drawer and lots of Activities that extends this Activity.
I have tried both in different projects and found some things worth sharing.
For me The MainActivity that handles drawer and then using Fragments to fill the display is the best.
You will need to handle callbacks from specific Fragments in your MainActivity and redirect them to the specific Fragment they came from. This is mainly if you use Interfaces in objects lower in the Arcitecture chain since you sometimes need to pass down Activity to certain objects. This generates more code that are not as generic as one might want in top level architecture node.
If you are using a ParentActivity and extending it for each ChildActivity, you can write all specific code in the child, meaning that the toplevel ParentActivity will almost only have generic code.
If you are using the ParentActivity with ChildActivities and you are switching between Activities, you fill get the graphic when an Activity closes and the next opens every time a user switches between navigation objects. If you use Fragments this wont happen as the Fragment will be switched in the background. The user will also experience that the navigation drawer will be closed and recreated each time he clicks on an item there.
Its also unnessecary to recreate the navigation drawer with each click on an item. This is a minus for the ParentActivity approach.
With the ParentActivity approach you will also have to keep track of how the backbutton should function, this will be autoaticly handled for you with Fragments. Also when starting new Activities you have to choose if a new Activity should be created or if the old should be killed etc.
Just my 5c, hopes it helps :)
The best way is to use one Activity with one Fragment per section/view.
Take a look at the design documentation.
Also see the Tutorial and Sample Application. It's fairly straight-forward.
You will have one activity which manages ActionBar, Drawer (ListView!) and Fragment.
Every time it clicks an item in the ListView it updates the fragment with the new view.
If you use different Activities then you should use intents with a very bad effect, use a different activity only if needed (if it's totally unrelated to the current activity maybe?)
Official documentation: http://developer.android.com/training/implementing-navigation/nav-drawer.html
If you got any problem in creating this, online you can found more tutorials but the official is very great.
You should have the activity holding the actionbar & drawer
When using a drawer you should not start new activities from within the drawer but fragment instead
Good post & video about it: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RomanNurik/posts/3nMVVQzUTjG
another good read: http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2013/05/the-new-navigation-drawer-pattern.html
And finally this is a must see also (check the slides or the video): https://plus.google.com/u/0/+NickButcher/posts/1jeyV2n1ZpM

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