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)

Providing direct navigation to screens


Swiping through a list of screens one by one is useful for scenarios where users wish to browse through the available screens. There are times, though, when users may prefer to be able to navigate directly to a particular screen. In this section, we will explore two options to provide direct screen navigation support. One option for directly navigating to a small number of screens and another for directly navigating to a larger number of screens.

Don't get trapped in the past

Before we look at solutions to providing direct screen navigation, I would like to point out two direct screen navigation features of Android Studio that you should avoid.

On the Customize the Activity dialog we used earlier in the Adding swipe navigation with Android Studio section of this chapter, the Navigation Style selection offers two options other than the Swipe Views (ViewPager) option we chose. One option is Action Bar Tabs (with ViewPager), which creates a traditional tab...