Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Creating the Data Access Layer


Now that you have something to write into the database, you need some way to actually write it, and a way to retrieve it again. The most common pattern is to have a dedicated class to deal with this for each class--a Data Access Object class, also known as a DAO. In Room, however, all you have to do is declare what they should look like using an interface; Room will write the implementation code for you. You define your queries using the @Query annotation on a method, like this:

@Query(“SELECT * FROM users WHERE _id = :id”)
public User selectById(long id);

This has a huge advantage over traditional O/R mapping layers in that you can still write any form of SQL query, and let Room figure out how to convert it into the object model you ask for. If it can't write the code, you get an error at compile time, rather than potentially having your app crash for your users. This also has an additional advantage: Room can bind your SQL queries to non-entity classes, allowing...