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)

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...