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)

Chapter 2. Fragments and UI Flexibility

This chapter builds on the concepts introduced in the previous chapter to provide solutions to addressing specific differences in device layouts. The chapter explains the use of adaptive activity layout definitions to create apps that automatically rearrange their user interface in response to the differences in device form factors. With adaptive activity layout definitions, applications are able to support a wide variety of devices using just a few properly designed fragments.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Simplifying the challenge of supporting device differences

  • Dynamic resource selection

  • Coordinating fragment content

  • The role of FragmentManager

  • Supporting fragments across activities

By the end of this chapter, we will be able to implement a user interface that uses fragments to automatically adapt to differences in device layouts and coordinates user actions across the involved fragments.