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)

Improving navigation with the ActionBar


Beginning at API Level 11 (Android 3.0), Android moved away from using traditional menus to instead use the ActionBar. The ActionBar provides action items that are a combination of button-based actions that appear directly on the ActionBar and menu-based actions that appear in a drop-down list when the user taps on the Action overflow button. The following screenshot shows the available ActionBar actions:

What many developers don't realize is that the button-based and menu-based actions are just a small subset of what the ActionBar actually does. The ActionBar now serves as a central point for many navigation-related behaviors. Two of these behaviors are tied directly to fragments: tab navigation and drop-down navigation.

Note

To incorporate the ActionBar in applications targeting versions of Android with an API Level below 11, use the ActionBarCompat class available in the Android Support Library. For more information on the ActionBarCompat class visit...