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 3. Fragment Life Cycle and Specialization

This chapter discusses the relationship of the life cycle of fragments with that of activities and demonstrates the appropriate programming actions at various points in the life cycle. The special purpose fragment classes, ListFragment and DialogFragment, are introduced covering their use and how their behavior in the activity life cycle differs from that of standard fragments.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

  • Fragment setup/display event sequence

  • Fragment teardown/hide event sequence

  • Working with the ListFragment class

  • Working with the DialogFragment class

  • Interacting with a DialogFragment class as a traditional Dialog class

  • Wrapping an existing Dialog class in a DialogFragment class

By the end of this chapter, we will be able to coordinate the setup and teardown of fragments within their host activities and effectively utilize the ListFragment and DialogFragment classes.