Book Image

Creating Dynamic UIs with Android Fragments - Second Edition

By : Jim Wilson
Book Image

Creating Dynamic UIs with Android Fragments - Second Edition

By: Jim Wilson

Overview of this book

Today’s users expect mobile apps to be dynamic and highly interactive, with rich navigation features. These same apps must look fantastic whether running on a medium-resolution smartphone or high-resolution tablet. Fragments provide the toolset we need to meet these user expectations by enabling us to build our applications out of adaptable components that take advantage of the rich capabilities of each individual device and automatically adapt to their differences. This book looks at the impact fragments have on Android UI design and their role in both simplifying many common UI challenges and in providing best practices for incorporating rich UI behaviors. We look closely at the roll of fragment transactions and how to work with the Android back stack. Leveraging this understanding, we explore several specialized fragment-related classes such as ListFragment and DialogFragment. We then go on to discuss how to implement rich navigation features such as swipe-based screen browsing, and the role of fragments when developing applications that take advantage of the latest aspects of Material Design. You will learn everything you need to provide dynamic, multi-screen UIs within a single activity, and the rich UI features demanded by today’s mobile users.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

A brave new world


As we discussed, 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 creating 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.