Storing data on the device

So you have downloaded the XML and presented it on-screen. What are you going to do with it now? If your user closes the app now and then re-opens it an hour later, would you grab the RSS again? If you were showing the latest news, the user would accept this. But if your RSS was, for example, a major league fixture list or next year's cricket fixtures, it would not be acceptable to refresh the content every time your user accesses the feed. Furthermore, what if the device is offline, outside network coverage, or in airplane mode? What would you do then?

The answer is to store the XML. This means that the users do not have to wait for the list to be refreshed every time they open the screen, and also allows the content to be browsed when the device is offline. It is better to display the content last fetched than to display nothing at all.

There are three different methods for storing data on the device. You can keep it in a file, in a database, or in property files...