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)

Creating UI flexibility


Utilizing fragments in our user interface design provides a good foundation for creating applications that more easily adapt to device differences, but we must go a little further to create truly flexible UIs. We must design our application such that the fragments that make up the UI are easily rearranged in response to the characteristics of the device on which the app is currently running.

To achieve this, we must follow appropriate techniques to dynamically change the layout of individual fragments in response to the current device's characteristics. Once we employ these techniques, we must be sure that we implement our fragments in such a way that each fragment can function effectively, independent of layout changes that might affect the behavior or even existence of other fragments within the activity.

Dynamic fragment layout selection

As we mentioned in the previous section, creating a flexible UI requires that the layout and positioning of fragments within an...