Book Image

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

By : Jim Wilson
Book Image

Creating Dynamic UI with Android Fragments

By: Jim Wilson

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

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.