Chapter 5. Structural Patterns

So far in this book, we have looked at patterns for holding and returning data and for combining objects into larger ones, but we have not yet considered how we offer a selection of choices to the user.

In planning our sandwich builder app, we would ideally like to offer the customer a wide range of possible ingredients. Probably the best way to present such choices is through a list or, for large collections of data, a series of lists. Android manages these processes very nicely with the RecyclerView, which is a list container and manager that replaced the previous ListView. This is not to say that the plain, old list view should never be used, and in cases where all we want is a short, simple text list of a few items, using a recycler view could be considered overkill, and list views are often the way to go. Saying that, the recycler view is far superior particularly when it comes to managing data, keeping the memory footprint small and scrolling...