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Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments
Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments: Make your Android apps a superior, silky-smooth experience for the end-user with this comprehensive guide to creating a dynamic and multi-pane UI. Everything you need to know in one handy volume.

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Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

Chapter 2. Fragments and UI Flexibility

This chapter builds on the concepts introduced in the previous chapter to provide solutions to addressing specific differences in device layouts. The chapter explains the use of adaptive Activity layout definitions to create apps that automatically rearrange their user interface in response to differences in device form factors. With adaptive Activity layout definitions, applications are able to support a wide variety of devices using just a few properly designed fragments.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Simplifying the challenge of supporting device differences

  • Dynamic resource selection

  • Coordinating fragment content

  • The role of FragmentManager

  • Supporting fragments across activities

By the end of this chapter, we will be able to implement a user interface that uses fragments to automatically adapt to differences in device layouts and coordinates user actions across the involved fragments.

Creating UI flexibility


Utilizing fragments in our user interface design provides a good foundation for creating applications that more easily adapt to device differences, but we must go a little further to create truly flexible UIs. We must design our application such that the fragments that make up the UI are easily rearranged in response to the characteristics of the device on which the app is currently running.

To achieve this, we must use some techniques to dynamically change the layout of individual fragments in response to the current device's characteristics. Once we employ such a technique, we must be sure that we implement our fragments in such a way that each fragment is able to function effectively independent of layout changes that might affect the behavior or even existence of other fragments within the activity.

Dynamic fragment layout selection

As we mentioned in the previous section, creating a flexible UI requires that the layout and positioning of fragments within an activity...

Fragments protect against the unexpected


The true test of user interface flexibility is in how well the user interface design and implementation hold up when encountering an unexpected change request. A well-designed fragment-based user interface allows us to create incredible dynamic user interfaces that can evolve and change with minimal impact on the code. As an example, let's make what could potentially be a major design change on our application.

Currently, the application always shows the book list and description on the same activity. The only difference is whether the fragments are positioned vertically or horizontally relative to one another. Imagine we receive feedback from our users that they don't like the way the app appears when viewed on a portrait-oriented handset. When viewed on a portrait-oriented handset, they would like the list and description to appear on separate activities. In all other cases, they want the app to continue to show the list and description side-by-side...

Summary


Fragments provide our applications with a level of user interface flexibility that would be difficult to achieve otherwise. By properly designing our application to use fragments and associating the fragment resources with the appropriate device characteristics, we're able to build apps that contain a rich user interface that automatically adapts to the wide variety of Android device form factors that exist. We get all of these capabilities while writing only minimal code.

In the next chapter, we dig into the lifecycle of fragments and explore how we can leverage the fragment lifecycle to create more responsive user interfaces and leverage specialized Fragment classes.

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Key benefits

  • Learn everything you need to know to provide dynamic multi-screen UIs within a single activity
  • Integrate the rich UI features demanded by today's mobile users
  • Understand the basics of using fragments and how to use them to create more adaptive and dynamic user experiences

Description

To create a dynamic and multi-pane user interface on Android, you need to encapsulate UI components and activity behaviors into modules that you can swap into and out of your activities. You can create these modules with the fragment class, which behaves somewhat like a nested activity that can define its own layout and manage its own lifecycle. When a fragment specifies its own layout, it can be configured in different combinations with other fragments inside an activity to modify your layout configuration for different screen sizes (a small screen might show one fragment at a time, but a large screen can show two or more). Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments shows you how to create modern Android applications that meet the high expectations of today's users. You will learn how to incorporate rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing and how to create adaptive UIs that ensure your application looks fantastic whether run on a low cost smartphone or the latest tablet. This book looks at the impact fragments have on Android UI design and their role in both simplifying many common UI challenges and providing new ways to incorporate rich UI behaviors. You will learn how to use fragments to create UIs that automatically adapt to device differences. We look closely at the roll of fragment transactions and how to work with the Android back stack. Leveraging this understanding, we then explore several specialized fragment-related classes like ListFragment and DialogFragment as well as rich navigation features like swipe-based screen browsing.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers with a basic understanding of Android programming who would like to improve the appearance and usability of their applications. Whether you're looking to create a more interactive user experience, create more dynamically adaptive UIs, provide better support for tablets and smartphones in a single app, reduce the complexity of managing your app UIs, or you are just trying to expand your UI design philosophy, then this book is for you.

What you will learn

  • Understand the role and capabilities of fragments
  • Explore the fragment-oriented features of Android Studio
  • Create an app UI that works effectively on smartphones and tablets
  • Use fragments to create engaging navigation capabilities like swipe-based screen browsing
  • Work with special purpose fragment classes like ListFragment and DialogFragment
  • Dynamically manage fragments using the FragmentTransaction class
  • Learn appropriate application design for communicating between fragments
  • Efficiently handle fragment creation and lifecycle
  • Simplify cross-thread UI handling with fragments
  • Form multi-screen UIs that run within a single activity
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Publication date : Sep 25, 2013
Length: 122 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

5 Chapters
Fragments and UI Modularization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Fragments and UI Flexibility Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Fragment Lifecycle and Specialization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Working with Fragment Transactions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Rich Navigation with Fragments Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Danny Preussler Nov 29, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The concept of Fragments was introduced in Android Honeycomb. Although this feels like a very long time, it was in fact only 2 years ago. This new book attempts to summarise some of the last 2 years and what we (should) have learned.The book starts with an overview of when to use fragments (and also when not to) and introduces them using an example that we follow throughout the book. The example changes from a simple app into a more advanced one with landscape views, which is later migrated to tablets. This way it changes from a normal layout application into one with fragments.It not only explains resource folders, but also layout aliases mechanism. This is a great start for new developers.If you are already familiar with fragments you might want to skip the first part but should pay attention to the the part about lifecycle. It details exactly how lifecycle and associated methods of activities and fragment are bound. The book describes the important differences between onCreate() and onCreateView() especially when it comes to pausing views and what it means in terms of performance for the developer.The last part of the book covers actionbar navigation examples built with fragments as tabs or dropdown navigation. For me, this is the only negative point in the book -- nowadays most people use menu drawer for navigation, but this is completly missing in the book. It would have been great to see this compared to other modes and what you need to change in your app and how it effects your fragments.Altogether this is an important book. It's not a large book, just a few hundred pages, so a quick read and a quick win.
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Cong La Mar 15, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This is a one of the best Android books I have had. Good examples and very clear explanations.
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Fabio Radin Dec 09, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The book by Jim Wilson is very clear and exhaustive about a powerfull technique of the most modern UI design approach for Android applications. The intention is really clear: to describe with a very detailed level the pros and cons of fragments approach, in contrast with activity based one. In addition to that, Jim explains all the fragments related stuff to create very effective Android UI...Divided in three parts, the first one is a simple but efficient comparison between the traditional way of programming UI for Android and the new one (introduced in Android Honeycomb, 3.0 version, when tablets starts to came out). The middle part covers the lifecycle of fragments inside the Android application (I really appreciate this one!), about two aspects: in the creation, setup, destruction and management of fragments inside the Android application and in the fragment transactions in the UI, in order to create rich UI navigation. In the end, the third part improves the ActionBar design and workflow.The required level to approach this book is more or less low: basic knowledge of Android programming and a working development environment for the examples.In summary, I found this book really helpful to introduce and make you a master in Android Fragment design and code writing.Note: This book was provided for review by Packt.
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Amazon Customer Dec 19, 2013
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Over the past few months I have been trying to expand my knowledge of Android development and this was a great supplement on the subject of Fragments.The in depth coverage of the topics were of a very high standard as I have come to expect of most Packt Publications.This is a must read for any serious Android developer
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Shaju Mathew Dec 03, 2013
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Well presented, succinct, hands-on how-to guide on how to leverage the fragments interface to create a responsive and portable Android UI that behaves as-designed on different form-factors, screen resolutions and operating mode. Unlike other Android/UI material that aspire to be a catch-all for all things ui, this book focuses exclusively on fragments, navigation mechanisms that take advantage of this API, how to promote code reuse and reduce APK footprint. Hard-to-understand concepts such as fragment lifecycle, loosely coupling user-interface segments, dynamic fragment loading, Actionbar integration, swipe navigation in gallery style, implementing tabs with fragments, etc are clearly explained by analyzing the application side-by-side, with and without employing these new functionality exposed by the Android SDK. Obviously, a fundamental understanding of mobile user-interface, Android lifecycle, layouts, are a requirement.
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