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)

A brave new world


As we've seen, fragments provide us with the ability to closely control and manage our application user interface. Through the use of the FragmentTransaction class we can provide the user with the experience of moving from one screen to another by simply switching between different fragments. This takes us to an entirely new way of thinking: a brave new world of application design.

When we create our user interface in this way, the activity acts as a sort of screen manager with the fragments implementing the screens themselves. This concept of managing the individual application screens as fragments within an activity is so powerful that it has become the foundation of some of the most compelling navigation features of the Android platform.

Android provides classes that cooperate with this design pattern to enable us to create rich navigation and screen management experiences, in a simple way. These classes provide a variety of features, including transition effects along...