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Creating Android Applications: Develop

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Creating Android

Applications
DEVELOP AND DESIGN

Chris Haseman
Creating
Android
Applications
DEVELOP AND DESIGN

Chris Haseman
Creating Android Applications: Develop and Design
Chris Haseman

Peachpit Press
1249 Eighth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
510/524-2178
510/524-2221 (fax)

Find us on the Web at: www.peachpit.com

To report errors, please send a note to [email protected]
Peachpit Press is a division of Pearson Education.
Copyright © 2012 by Chris Haseman

Editor: Cliﬀord Colby

Development editor: Robyn Thomas
Production editor: Myrna Vladic
Copyeditor: Scout Festa
Technical editor: Jason LeBrun
Cover design: Aren Howell Straiger
Interior design: Mimi Heft
Compositor: Danielle Foster
Indexer: Valerie Haynes Perry

Notice of Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact [email protected].

Notice of Liability
The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis without warranty. While every precaution has
been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any
person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by
the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.

Trademarks
Android is a trademark of Google Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Many of the
designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks.
Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designa-
tions appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified
throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no
intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey
endorsement or other affiliation with this book.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-78409-4
ISBN-10: 0-321-78409-x

987654321

Printed and bound in the United States of America

To my wife, Meghan,
who’s made me the teacher, writer, and man I am today.
BIO

Chris Haseman has been writing mobile software in various forms since 2003.
He was involved in several large-scale BREW projects, from MMS messaging to
Major League Baseball. More recently, he was an early Android engineer behind
the doubleTwist media player, and he is now the lead Android developer for the
website Tumblr. He’s a faculty member of General Assembly in NYC, where he
teaches Android development. He lives in Brooklyn, where he constantly debates
shaving his beard.

IV CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I could spend more pages thanking people than are in the work itself.
Here are a few who stand out:
David and Susanne H for their support. Ellen Y. for believing so early that I
could do this. JBL for fixing my code. Robyn T. for her patience. Cliff C. for finding
me. Scout F. for her tolerance of my grammar. Sharon H. for her harassment IMs.
Dan C. for his backing. Edwin and Susan K. for their care. Thomas K. for his subtle
and quiet voice. Sparks for his humor. Cotton for “being there.” Lee for the place
to write. The teams at both Tumblr and doubleTwist for all their encouragement.
The Android team at Google for all their hard work. Most of all, Peachpit for giving
me the opportunity to write for you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS V
CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Welcome to Android . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Downloading Developer Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Android Software Development Kit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Java . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Getting Everything Installed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Installing Eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Installing the Android SDK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Downloading a Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Conﬁguring Eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Adding the Android Plug-in to Eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Locating the SDK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Creating an Emulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Working with Your Android Phone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Creating a New Android Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Running a New Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Troubleshooting the Emulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

The Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The Manifest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The Activity Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Watching the Activity in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Implementing Your Own Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
The Life and Times of an Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Bonus Round—Data Retention Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
The Intent Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Manifest Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Adding an Intent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Listening for Intents at Runtime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Moving Your Own Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
The Application Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
The Default Application Declaration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

VI CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

Customizing Your Own Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Accessing the Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

The View Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Creating a View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Altering the UI at Runtime . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Handling a Few Common Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Creating Custom Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Resource Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Resource Folder Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Values Folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Layout Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
Drawable Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Layout Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
The ViewGroup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
The AbsoluteLayout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
The LinearLayout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
The RelativeLayout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

The Main Thread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
You There, Fetch Me that Data! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Watchdogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
What Not to Do . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
When Am I on the Main Thread? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Getting Oﬀ the Main Thread . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Getting Back to Main Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
There Must Be a Better Way! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
The AsyncTask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
How to Make It Work for You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
A Few Important Caveats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
The IntentService . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Declaring a Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Fetching Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

CONTENTS VII
Checking Your Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Two Pieces to Each List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
ListView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
Adapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
A Main Menu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Creating the Menu Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Creating a ListActivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Deﬁning a Layout for Your ListActivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Making a Menu List Item . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Creating and Populating the ArrayAdapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Reacting to Click Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Complex List Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
The 1000-foot View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Creating the Main Layout View . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
Creating the ListActivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Getting Twitter Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Making a Custom Adapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Building the ListViews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
How Do These Objects Interact? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145

CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

What Is a Service? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
The Service Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Keeping Your Service Running . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Shut It Down! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Intent-Based Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Binder Service Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166

CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

Uncovering the Secrets of the res/ Folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Layout Folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
What Can You Do Beyond Landscape? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

VIII CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

The Full Screen Deﬁne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Limiting Access to Your App to Devices That Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
The <uses> Tag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
SDK Version Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
Handling Code in Older Android Versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
SharedPreferences and Apply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Reﬂecting Your Troubles Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Always Keep an Eye on API Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Adding a VideoView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
Setting up for the VideoView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Getting Media to Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Loading and Playing Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Cleanup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
The Rest, as They Say, Is Up to You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
MediaPlayer and State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Playing a Sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Cleanup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
It really is that simple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Longer-Running Music Playback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Binding to the Music Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Finding the Most Recent Track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
Playing the Audio in the Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Cleanup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Interruptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

Location Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Mother May I? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Be Careful What You Ask For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Finding a Good Supplier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Getting the Goods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211

CONTENTS IX
The Sneaky Shortcut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
That’s It! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Show Me the Map! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Getting the Library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Adding to the Manifest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Creating the MapActivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Creating a MapView . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Run, Baby, Run . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY . . . . . . . . . 220

Fragments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
The Lifecycle of the Fragment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
Creating a Fragment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Showing a Fragment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Providing Backward Compatibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
The Action Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Showing the Action Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Adding Elements to the Action Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237

CHAPTER 11 PUBLISHING YOUR APPLICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

Packaging and Versioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Preventing Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Naming the Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Versioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Setting a Minimum SDK value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Packaging and Signing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Exporting a Signed Build . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Backing Up Your Keystore File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Submitting Your Build . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Watch Your Crash Reports and Fix Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Update Frequently . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

X CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

If you’ve got a burning idea for an application that you’re dying to share, or if you
recognize the power and possibilities of the Android platform, you’ve come to the
right place. This is a short book on an immense topic.
I don’t mean to alarm anyone right off the bat here, but let me be honest: Android
development is hard. Its architecture is dissimilar to that of many existing platforms
(especially other mobile SDKs), there are many traps for beginners to fall into, and the
documentation is frequently sparse at best. In exchange for its difficulty, however,
Google’s Android offers unprecedented power, control, and—yes—responsibility to
those who are brave enough to develop for it.
This is where my job comes in. I’m here to make the process of learning to write
amazing Android software as simple as possible.
Who am I to ask such things of you? I’ve been writing mobile software in a
professional capacity for more than eight years, and for three of those years, I’ve
been developing software for Android. I’ve written code that runs on millions of
handsets throughout the world. Also, I have a beard. We all know that people with
ample facial hair appear to be more authoritative on all subjects.
In return for making this learning process as easy as possible, I ask for a few things:
䊏 You have a computer. My third-grade teacher taught me never to take any-
thing for granted; maybe you don’t have a computer. If you don’t already have
a computer, you’ll need one—preferably a fast one, because the Android
emulator and Eclipse can use up a fair amount of resources quickly.

NOTE: Android is an equal opportunity development platform.

While I personally develop on a Mac, you can use any of the three
major platforms (Mac, PC, or Linux).

䊏 You’re fluent in Java. Notice that I say fluent, not expert. Because you’ll
be writing usable applications (rather than production libraries, at least to
start), I expect you to know the differences between classes and interfaces.
You should be able to handle threads and concurrency without batting an
eyelash. Further, the more you know about what happens under the hood
(in terms of object creation and garbage collection), the faster and better
your mobile applications will be.

Yes, you can get through the book and even put together rudimentary
applications without knowing much about the Java programming language.

INTRODUCTION XI
However, when you encounter problems—in both performance and pos-
sibilities—a weak foundation in the programming language may leave you
without a solution.
䊏 You have boundless patience and endless curiosity. Your interest in and
passion for Android will help you through the diﬃcult subjects covered in
this book and let you glide through the easy ones.

Throughout this book, I focus on how to write features, debug problems, and
make interesting software. I hope that when you’ve ﬁnished the book, you’ll have
a ﬁrm grasp of the fundamentals of Android software development.

NOTE: If you’re more interested in the many “whys” behind Android,

this book is a good one to start with, but it won’t answer every question
you may have.

All right, that’s quite enough idle talking. Let’s get started.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR

This book is for people who have some programming experience and are curious
about the wild world of Android development.

WHO THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR

This book is not for people who have never seen a line of Java before. It is also not
for expert Android engineers with several applications under their belt.

HOW YOU WILL LEARN

In this book, you’ll learn by doing. Each chapter comes with companion sample code
and clear, concise instructions for how to build that code for yourself. You’ll ﬁnd the
code samples on the book’s website (www.peachpit.com/androiddevelopanddesign).

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

You’ll learn the basics of Android development, from creating a project to building
scalable UIs that move between tablets and phones.

XII CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

i
WELCOME TO
ANDROID
WELCOME TO ANDROID

Eclipse and the Android SDK are the two major tools you’ll use to follow along with the
examples in this book. There are, however, a few others you should be aware of that will
be very useful now and in your future work with Android. While you may not use all of
these tools until you’re getting ready to ship an application, it will be helpful to know
about them when the need arises.

THE TOOLS
Over the course of this book, you’ll work with several tools that will make your life
with Google’s Android much easier. Here they are in no particular order:

ECLIPSE ANDROID SDK

Eclipse is the primary The Android SDK contains
tool that I’ll be using all the tools you’ll need to
throughout the book. develop Android applica-
Google has blessed it tions from the command
as the primary IDE for line as well as other tools
Android development and to help you find and
has released plug-ins to diagnose problems and
help. Make sure you get streamline your applica-
them, because they take tions. You can download
all the pain out of creat- the Android SDK at
ing a project and stepping http://developer.android
through your application .com/sdk/index.html.
on the device. You’re
welcome to use Eclipse
as well, or, if you’re some
sort of command-line
junkie, you can follow
along with Vim or Emacs
if you prefer.

XIV CREATING ANDROID APPLICATIONS: DEVELOP AND DESIGN

ANDROID SDK HIERARCHY VIEWER DDMS
MANAGER This tool will help you DDMS (Dalvik Debug
The Android SDK Manager track the complex con- Monitor Server) is your
(found within the SDK nections between your primary way to interface
tools/ directory) will layouts and views as you with and debug Android
help you pull down all build and debug your devices. You’ll find it in
versions of the SDK as applications. This viewer the tools/ directory inside
well as a plethora of tools, can be indispensable the Android SDK. It does
third-party add-ons, and when tracking down everything from gathering
all things Android. This those hard-to-understand logs, sending mock text
will be the primary way layout issues. You can messages or locations,
in which you get new find this tool in the and mapping memory
software from Google’s SDK tools/ directory as allocations to taking
headquarters in Moun- hierarchyviewer. screenshots. Eclipse users
tain View, California. have a perspective that
duplicates, within Eclipse,
all the functionality that
this stand-alone applica-
tion offers. This tool is
very much the Swiss Army
knife of your Android
toolkit.

WELCOME TO ANDROID XV
1
GETTING STARTED
WITH ANDROID
The ﬁrst step when building
ngg an Android appli-
applli-
cation is installing the tools
ls and the SDK. If you’ve already
built an Android application,
ion, congratulations are in order!
You can skip this chapter and move on to the fundamentals. For
those of you who haven’t, you’ll get through this busy work before
you can say “Open Handset Alliance” three times quickly.

In this chapter, you’ll move quickly through the platform con-

figuration. I’ll show you how to download developer files from
Google and the Eclipse project; install and configure the Android
Software Development Kit (SDK) and Eclipse; create and configure
a shiny new Android emulator; start a new Android project; and
run your Android project on your shiny new Android emulator.

3
DOWNLOADING
DEVELOPER SOFTWARE

First, you need to download a few software tools—namely, the Android SDK,
the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), and the Android plug-in
for Eclipse. There are many other tools a developer could use to make Android
applications, but I’ve found that this setup has the fewest hassles and will get you
up and running in the least amount of time.

THE ANDROID SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT KIT

Head over to the Android Developers website at http://developer.android.com.
You’ll become intimately familiar with these pages as you work on this platform.
Once on the site, find the section labeled SDK and download the offered files with
reckless abandon. On Windows, it’s best if you use the offered installer. For you
Mac and Linux users, you’ll get a zip file. Set the appropriate files to downloading
and move on while they finish.

ECLIPSE
For versions of Eclipse newer than 3.5, Google recommends that you get the classic
version of the IDE. Tap your way to www.eclipse.org/downloads and locate Eclipse
Classic. (This chapter has screenshots from 3.6.1; the latest is, however, 3.7.1.) Make
sure you get the right version for your system: 32-bit or 64-bit. Now get your twid-
dling thumbs ready and wait for the installer to come through. Assuming that you’re
not connecting through a telephone line that makes hissing noises, you should be
ﬁnished in just a few minutes.
In the meantime, I’ll entertain you with an opera about the nature of kittens . . .
wait no, no I won’t. You’re welcome to browse ahead in the book while you down-
load the required ﬁles.

JAVA
You’ll need to download and install Java on your system (depending on how much
development you’ve done before, you might already have it installed). I assume
you were already comfortable with Java before diving into this book; I’m also going
to assume you’re comfortable installing the JDK yourself.

4 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

GETTING EVERYTHING INSTALLED

At this point, the process becomes a little more complicated and the herd of cats
start to wander in different directions. Depending on which platform you’re run-
ning, you may have to skip ahead from time to time. If the title doesn’t look like
it applies to your operating system (OS), skip ahead until you find one that does.
Bear with me; you’ll be working on your first application in no time.

NOTE: For the duration of this book, I’m going to assume you’ll
be using the Eclipse IDE for the majority of your development. I’ll try
to include command-line methods as well as Eclipse screenshots for
all important commands and tasks in case you’re rocking the terminal
with Vim or Emacs.

INSTALLING ECLIPSE
Installing Eclipse, for the most part, is as simple as decompressing the ﬁle you’ve
downloaded and putting the application somewhere you’ll remember. I recommend
not launching Eclipse just yet. Wait until you’ve got the Android SDK squared
away (see the next section). You may want to make sure that you’ve got the latest
development tools in place.

INSTALLING THE ANDROID SDK

With Eclipse now in place, you’re just a few steps away from running your own
Android application. Find the section that applies to your operating system, and
follow the steps therein.

INSTALLING THE SDK FOR MAC USERS

To install the SDK, simply unzip the compressed ﬁle you downloaded from the
Android Developers site (developer.android.com). Although you can unpack
this ﬁle anywhere, I recommend placing it in /Users/yourUserName/Documents/
android_sdk/.
If you are a command-line person, you should put two directories on your
path as follows:

1. Navigate to /User/yourUserName/.profile.

GETTING EVERYTHING INSTALLED 5

2. Assuming that you installed the SDK in the location I recommended, add
the following code all on one line:
export PATH=”$PATH”/Users/*yourUserName*/Documents/android_
sdk/tools”/Users/*yourUserName*/Documents/android_sdk/
platform-tools”

Now, when you open a new terminal, typing which android will return the
path where you installed your shiny new Android SDK. Keep this command in
mind—you’ll return to it in a minute.

INSTALLING THE SDK FOR LINUX USERS

Linux users should go through nearly the same steps as in “Installing the SDK for Mac
Users.” The only diﬀerences are the instructions for putting the SDK on your path
and where you may want to put your version of the SDK. I’m going to assume that if
you’re a Linux user, you’re savvy enough to ﬁgure out this procedure on your own.

INSTALLING THE SDK FOR WINDOWS USERS

To install the Android SDK for Windows, follow these steps:

1. Start the Android SDK installer.

2. Accept the installer’s default location and Start-menu conﬁguration.

3. Let the installer work its magic.

This procedure will add an SDK Manager command to your Start menu.
This is the application you’ll work with to select the correct platforms in
the next section.

DOWNLOADING A PACKAGE
All right, you’ve got the SDK downloaded and in the right place. You’re not quite
there yet.

1. If you are a Mac or Linux user, run sdk location/tools/android; if you

are a Windows user, allow the installer to open the AVD (Android Virtual
Device) Manager software.

You should see the Android SDK Manager.

6 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

FIGURE 1.1 Use the Android
SDK Manager to select as
many versions as you would
like to install.

NOTE: If you’ve closed it, you can find the SDK Manager program
in your Start menu under Android SDK Tools.

2. Select Available Packages from the options in the left panel.

3. Select as many versions of the SDK as you like from the panel on the right.
(At press time, there are still a few phones running 1.6.) At the very least,
you’ll probably want Gingerbread (2.3.3), which many phones are running.
You’ll need Honeycomb (for tablets) and Ice Cream Sandwich (the latest
and greatest) for the last chapter of the book. If you’re in a rush, just grab
2.3.3 for now (Figure 1.1).

4. In the resulting dialog, click Install x Packages, agree to Google’s terms (read
at your own risk), and away you go.

The Android SDK Manager should download and install the two required
platforms for you. So far, so good.

Keep in mind that the platform you’re downloading corresponds to a particular

version of the Android OS running on devices. Older phones may not support all
the SDK calls that the latest phones might. As you learn about various SDK calls,
I’ll show you strategies for dealing with older devices.

GETTING EVERYTHING INSTALLED 7

CONFIGURING ECLIPSE

FIGURE 1.2 Where Eclipse has

cleverly hidden the plug-in
install wizard.

FIGURE 1.3 The plug-in install

wizard in all its dull glory.

Fortunately, conﬁguring Eclipse is consistent for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Fire up
Eclipse and specify where you want to locate your workspace. It can, theoretically,
be installed anywhere, but I always locate mine under ~/Documents/workspace
on my Mac. As long as you consistently use the same directory, you shouldn’t
encounter any problems.

ADDING THE ANDROID PLUG-IN TO ECLIPSE

Now that you’ve got Eclipse up and running, you’ll need to add Android’s ADT plug-
in. This is the magic piece that will change Eclipse from a straight Java developer
tool into a tool for making Android applications.

1. From the Eclipse Help menu, select Install New Software (Figure 1.2).

2. Enter https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ in the Work With ﬁeld

in the Install pop-up. Your settings should look like those in Figure 1.3.

8 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

3. Give the site a name of your choosing. Mine was simply “android_stuﬀ.”

You’ll be presented with the option to install a few packages.

4. Select them all and click Next, then click Next again.

5. Accept Google’s terms and conditions. Eclipse will download the appropri-
ate plug-in packages.

NOTE: If you’re having trouble installing the Eclipse plug-ins,

make sure you have an active Internet connection. Try using “http”
instead of “https” for the plug-in URL. If all else fails, head over to
http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html#installing, where
you’ll find a few more helpful debugging steps.

Before the download ﬁnishes, you might be warned that unsigned code is
about to be installed. This is to be expected. (Don’t freak out.)

6. Accept the unsigned code warning and allow the download to continue.

7. Restart Eclipse when prompted.

LOCATING THE SDK

One more step and you’ll be able to create a project. You’ll need to tell Eclipse where
to ﬁnd your Android SDK.

1. Start Eclipse. You should be staring at the helpful Welcome screen.

2. Choose File > Preferences.

If everything you’ve done thus far is working, you should see an Android
option in the list on the left.

3. Click Android.

CONFIGURING ECLIPSE 9
FIGURE 1.4 Tell Eclipse where
to find the Android SDK.

4. In the SDK Location ﬁeld, enter the location to which you installed the SDK.
Figure 1.4 shows what it looks like on my Mac.

5. Click Apply.

In the large white box (which previously displayed “No target available”), you
should now see a list of available SDK platforms.
If you’re not seeing the list, then something isn’t right. Head back to the “Down-
loading a Package” section and see what needs sorting out.

CREATING AN EMULATOR
Although I said you had only one more step before you could create a project, and
that is true, you still need to create an emulator on which to run the project. So
hang in, you’re almost there.

1. With Eclipse running, click the icon on the top bar.

Or, if you’re a command-line junkie, run android in the shell (I’m going to
assume you were able to add it to your path).

10 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

FIGURE 1.5 Configuring
a new Android Virtual
Device (AVD).

This screen should look familiar, because you just used it to install one or
two application platforms. Now you’re back to make a new virtual device.

2. With the Android SDK Manager open, make sure the Virtual Devices tab is
selected and click New. A new emulator dialog will pop up.

3. In the Name ﬁeld, give your emulator a name; it’s best to give it one that
helps distinguish it from any others. You will have collected several emula-
tors before publishing your ﬁrst application.

4. From the Target drop-down menu, specify which SDK you want to target.
It’s simplest right now to start with Gingerbread (2.3.3), but everything will
still work on Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0).

5. In the SD Card ﬁeld, select the Size radio button and enter a small size.

6. In the Skin section, select the Built-In radio button and choose Default
WVGA800 from the drop-down menu.

The completed screen should look like Figure 1.5.

CONFIGURING ECLIPSE 11
7. Click Create AVD and do a little dance next to your desk (or don’t, it’s up
to you).

8. Select your new emulator and click the Start button to get it running. The
laborious process of spinning up a new instance of the virtual device will begin.

NOTE: Pro emulator tip: Once you start an instance of the emulator, you
don’t ever have to start it up again. Reinstalling the application does
not (as it does with many other systems) require you to spawn a new
instance of the emulator.

WORKING WITH YOUR ANDROID PHONE

In almost all cases when I have an actual Android device, I’ll do development on
it over the emulator. One of the wonderful things about Android is how utterly
simple it is to connect and work with nearly any Android phone. Here’s what you’ll
need to do if you want to start working with your own device.

1. Find the USB cable that came with your phone, and plug it into your
computer.

2. On your home screen, press the menu bar and go to Settings > Applica-
tions > Development and enable USB debugging by selecting the check box.

3. If you’re on a Windows machine, you may need to install the general USB
drivers. You can ﬁnd them at http://developer.android.com/sdk/win-usb.html.

4. If you’ve ﬁnished everything correctly, you should see a little bug icon in
the notiﬁcation bar on your device. Your phone will work in exactly the
same way an emulator would.

12 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

FIGURE 1.6 Your shiny new
emulator.

Congratulations! If you’ve followed every step thus far, you have your very own
shiny emulator or connected device, your Android SDK is correctly installed, and
you’re ready to rock and roll. Take a minute to bask in your own glory and play
around with your new emulator (Figure 1.6) before moving on to the next section,
which is about creating applications.

TIP: The emulator is a full Linux VM and can be a little heavy

on the system resources (especially while Eclipse is running),
so make sure your development machine has plenty of RAM.

CONFIGURING ECLIPSE 13
CREATING A NEW
ANDROID PROJECT

FIGURE 1.7 Select the project

type here (Android Project).

FIGURE 1.8 Enter all the pesky

details for your project here.

Google has provided a few helpful ways to create a new Android project.

1. Start Eclipse if it isn’t already running.

2. Choose File > New > Project. You should see the New Project screen
(Figure 1.7).

3. Click Next, and Android’s friendly project creation wizard will start
(Figure 1.8).

Let’s go over what each ﬁeld means to your project as you complete them.

NOTE: If you’re not seeing the Android folder, you’ll need to make
sure you’ve correctly installed the Android Eclipse plug-in. Head back
to “Configuring Eclipse” and see where things may have gone awry.

14 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

4. Enter a name for your project in the Project Name ﬁeld.

This is how Eclipse keeps track of your project. Further, it will create a folder
with this name and put all your project ﬁles into it. The project name will
not show up anywhere on the Android device once you install. The project
name is something that really only matters to Eclipse, so I tend to pick
descriptive names for projects.

5. In the Build Target section, select the version of Android you’re targeting.

Newer versions of Android always support applications built through older

SDKs. They accomplish this with what’s called compatibility mode. For now,
try to target the most advanced version you can.

6. In the Application Name ﬁeld, enter the full name of your application.

This is what will show in the app drawer after you have installed your app.

7. In the Package Name ﬁeld, enter the Java package where you will place
your ﬁrst activity.

8. Select the Create Activity check box and enter a name for your new activity
in the text box.

This step creates a new class with this name, so Java class naming conven-
tions apply. In Chapter 2, you’ll learn more speciﬁcs about what activities
are and how they work.

9. Click Finish and you should be oﬀ to the races!

Now that you have a project, let’s get it running.

CREATING A NEW ANDROID PROJECT 15

CREATING A PROJECT FROM THE COMMAND LINE

If you prefer to work from the command line, you can simply enter the
following three commands and move on with your day:
䊏 android create project -n MyFantasticSimpleProject -t 9 -p
myProjectDirectory -k com.haseman.fantasticProjctPackage -a
NewActivity

䊏 cd myProjectDirectory

䊏 ant install

These commands create a new project and install a new application on an

Android device. Assuming that you didn’t run into any errors, you should find
your sample app in the emulator’s app drawer.

16 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

RUNNING A NEW PROJECT

Follow these steps to get your project running:

1. If your emulator isn’t running, ﬁre it back up. You need to make sure the
IDE is in communication with the emulator; they frequently lose touch
with each other. If you’re using a device, make sure it’s showing up cor-
rectly here as well.

2. Open the DDMS perspective by choosing Window > Open Perspective > Other.

You should see a little android next to the DDMS option.

3. Open the DDMS perspective. Under the Devices tab, you should see an entry
for your emulator or device.

4. From the Run menu in Eclipse, choose “Run last launched” or Run. Eclipse
may ask you to conﬁrm that the app is indeed an Android project.

Android will compile, package, install, and run the application on your
emulator or device. If you can see the app running on your phone, congrats!
You’ve now oﬃcially created an Android application.

TIP: Command-line users can see DDMS by running . . . wait for

it . . . ddms on the command line.

RUNNING A NEW PROJECT 17

TROUBLESHOOTING
THE EMULATOR

If you’re sure your emulator is running, but it refuses to display in the list of devices,
you may need to restart the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). Doing this requires get-
ting into the terminal a little bit.

1. Open a terminal and change directories to the platform-tools folder inside

your Android SDK folder. For me, the command looks like cd ~/Documents/
android_sdk/platform-tools.

2. Run adb kill-server and count to 15.

3. Run adb start-server.

When you run the start command, you should see the following lines:
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *

4. Switch back to your DDMS perspective; you should see the virtual device
listed in the devices window.

5. Switch back to the Java perspective and, from the Run menu, select . . . wait
for it . . . Run.

It will ask you what kind of project it is.

6. Select Android. It may ask you which device you’d like to run your project on.
Eclipse may also want to know which device you’d like to run your project on.

7. If your emulator isn’t running, this will be your chance to start a new one.
Otherwise, select your Android Virtual Device that is already running and
click OK.

Switching back to the emulator should show something close to Figure 1.9.
Although it doesn’t do much, you’ve successfully created and run your ﬁrst
Android application. As Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step.

18 CHAPTER 1 GETTING STARTED WITH ANDROID

FIGURE 1.9 Your very first
Android application, running
on the emulator!

WRAPPING UP
This chapter covered downloading, installing, conﬁguring, creating, and running
Android applications. You now have the very basic tools that you’ll need to continue
with this book. Feel free, if you’re struggling with the topics in the later chapters,
to refer back to this chapter as needed.

WRAPPING UP 19
2
EXPLORING
THE APPLICATION
BASICS
I’m sure you’re ready to roll
ll up
u your sleeves and
an
nd
write more code. However,
er, there are a few topics in the
realm of theory and design
gn to cover in detail ﬁrst. In this
chapter, we’ll cover the basics of some essential building blocks,
including the ﬁles, parts, and terms that make up a simple Android
application; the Activity class that controls a single screen; the
Intent class, Android’s powerful communications class; and the
Application singleton class that can be accessed from all your
components.

I recommend you open Eclipse and follow along as I cover the

working parts of an Android application. I’ll be using the Android
project with the main activity, called MyActivity, that you created
in Chapter 1.

21
THE FILES

Any mobile application, in its most basic form, consists of a single screen that
launches by clicking an icon on the device’s main screen.
When the SDK creates a basic Android project, it also creates several ﬁles and
important directories.
As with any project, before you start building the structure it’s important to at
least take a quick look over the blueprints. Here are the ﬁle and folders that make
up your Android project structure.
䊏 AndroidManifest.xml

䊏 /res

䊏 /src

Throughout the rest of this chapter, I’ll refer to the manifest and these folders.

THE MANIFEST
The AndroidManifest.xml file is your portal to the rest of the phone. In it, you’ll
describe which of your components should receive what events. You’ll also
declare, in the manifest file, what hardware and software your app will need
permission to access. First, let’s take a look at the <manifest> declaration in the
AndroidManifest.xml file:

There are a few noteworthy items in this code. The package definition tells
Android in which Java package to look for the class files that make up the compo-
nents of your application. The next two variables are not particularly important right
now, but they will become vital once you’re ready to ship your application to the
Android Market. The versionCode is the number that helps the Market alert users
that an update is available. The versionName is a string that the application menus
and Market display to the user as the current version of your app.
Your application can have only one AndroidManifest.xml file. Henceforth, I’ll
refer to this file and concept simply as the manifest.

22 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

THE ACTIVITY CLASS

In a typical Android application, activities are the backbone of the operation. Essen-
tially, their purpose is to control what is displayed on the screen. They bridge the
gap between the data you wish to display and the UI layout ﬁles and classes that
do the work of displaying the data. If you’re familiar with the popular Model-View-
Controller (MVC) architecture, the activity would be the control for a screen. Here’s
what the activity declaration looks like in the manifest ﬁle:

The android:name tag tells the system what to place on the end of your package
(from the manifest declaration) to find your class definition. For example, in my
sample project at com.haseman.peachPit.MyActivity, the class loader will look
to find a class that extends the Activity class.
In order to be found, the file must reside under the src/com/haseman/peachPit
directory. This is standard operating procedure for the language that Android uses.

WATCHING THE ACTIVITY IN ACTION

The activity, if used correctly, is an object that speciﬁcally controls a single screen.
Let’s talk about this mythical activity in terms of a real-world RSS news feed
reader as a case study that can quickly explain what pages of theory would often
miss. A developer typically uses one activity to list all feeds to which a user has
subscribed. When a user taps a feed, the developer uses a second activity to display
a list of available articles for that particular news feed. Lastly, when a user clicks a
particular story, the developer uses a third activity to display article details.
It’s easy to see how activities ﬁll a certain role (subscription list, article list,
article detail). At the same time, the activities are general, in that the article list
should be able to display a list of articles from any RSS feed, and the article details
activity should show the details from any article found through an RSS reader.

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 23

IMPLEMENTING YOUR OWN ACTIVITY
In most cases, the best way to understand something is to use it. With that in mind,
let’s add a new activity to the project you created in Chapter 1. This will explain
how the activity works, its lifecycle, and what you need to know while working
with it. Here are the general steps you’ll need to follow:

1. Add an entry for the new activity into your manifest.

2. Create a new class that extends the Activity class.

3. Create a new ﬁle containing the XML layout instructions for this new activ-
ity, and add a new string literal for the layout to display (don’t worry, this
sounds a lot harder than it actually is).

4. When all the ﬁles are in place, you’ll need to actually launch this new activ-
ity from your existing one.

THE MOST BASIC OF ACTIVITIES

In its simplest form, an activity is an object that extends the Activity class. It
should, but doesn’t have to, implement the onCreate method. Here’s what your
activity looks like by default when you create a new project:

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
}
}

In this code, the device calls the onCreate method as the activity is starting.
onCreate tells the UI system that the setContentView method speciﬁes the main
layout ﬁle for this activity. Each activity may have one and only one content view,

24 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

so once you set it, it can’t be changed. This is how the Android SDK forces you to
use a new activity for each screen, because each time you want to change your root
content view, you’ll need a diﬀerent activity.

TELLING ANDROID ABOUT YOUR FRIENDLY NEW ACTIVITY

The Android system needs to know where to ﬁnd your new activity when it comes
time to load and launch it.

1. Open up the AndroidManifest.xml ﬁle in Eclipse.

2. Add the following line inside the <application> tag and directly after the
</activity> closing tag of the previous declaration:

This little line tells the system where to ﬁnd the new activity in your appli-
cation package. In the case of my demo, the class loader knows to look for
the activity at com.haseman.peachPit.NewActivity.

Next, you’ll need to put a ﬁle there for it to ﬁnd.

CREATING THE NEWACTIVITY CLASS

There are several ways to create a new activity, but here is the easiest way to do
it in Eclipse.

1. Right-click (or Control-click) the package name you’ve chosen (mine is

com.haseman.peachPit).

2. Select New, then select Class.

3. Give the class a name in the dialog.

A name is enough to create a new file. The file will be saved in your main
package under the name you specified. In my demo, it is in my project under
src/com/haseman/peachPit/NewActivity.java.

Now that you have a class that extends an object, you’ll need to switch it
over to extend an activity.

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 25

4. Make the following highlighted change to your code:
package com.haseman.peachPit;
import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
public class NewActivity extends Activity{
public void onCreate(Bundle icicle){
super.onCreate(icicle);
}
}

Notice that this code looks very similar to what is already in your existing
activity. Let’s make it a little bit diﬀerent.

5. In the res/values/strings.xml ﬁle, add the following highlighted lines in

the <resources> tag under the existing strings:
<resources>
<!—other strings are omitted here for brevity-->
<string name=”new_activity_text”>
Welcome to the New Activity!
</string>
</resources>

In these lines, you told Android that you want a new string with the name
new_activity_text that can be accessed through Android’s resource man-
ager. You’ll learn much more about the contents of the /values folder in
later chapters. Next, you need to create a layout ﬁle for your new activity.

26 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

CREATING A NEW SCREEN LAYOUT
Here’s how you create a new layout.

1. Create a new ﬁle named new_activity.xml inside the res/layout/ folder. It

should sit next to the existing main.xml ﬁle (which is used by your existing
activity). This new_activity.xml ﬁle should look almost exactly like main.xml,
except you’ll need to add a reference to the string you just created.

2. Insert the highlighted line to create a reference to the string you just created.

3. Give this modiﬁed TextView an ID so your Java code can reference it (you’ll
learn more about TextViews later; for now you should know that they’re
Android views that show text on the screen):
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/
p res/android”
android:orientation=”vertical”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”fill_parent”
>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/new_activity_text_view”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”@string/new_activity_text”
/>
</LinearLayout>

I will devote Chapter 3 to resource management and user interface design, but
for now just keep in mind that the @ preﬁx is how you tell Android you want
to reference an ID, string, or drawable that is deﬁned elsewhere as a resource.

Now that you have a new layout with its shiny new string, you’ll need to
tell the NewActivity class that you want it to use this particular layout ﬁle.

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 27

4. Add the following highlighted line to the onCreate method of your New
Activity class:

public void onCreate(Bundle icicle){

super.onCreate(icicle);
setContentView(R.layout.new_activity);
}

setContentView is the method in which you tell Android which XML ﬁle to
display for your new activity. Now that you’ve created a new class, string, and
layout ﬁle, it’s time to launch the activity and display your new view on the screen.

CATCHING KEYS
The simple way to launch your new activity is to have the user press the center key
on his or her device. If your phone doesn’t have a center key, you can easily modify
the following code to accept any key you like. To listen for key events, you’ll need to
extend the original activity’s onKeyDown method. Keep in mind that this is a simple
example case. Launching a new activity when the user presses a single key prob-
ably isn’t a very common use case in practice, but it makes for a good and simple
example. Most new activities are started when a user selects a list item, presses a
button, or takes another action with the screen.
Here’s what your new version of onKeyDown should look like:

@Override
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event){
if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_CENTER){
//Launch new Activity here!
return true;
}
return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

28 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

By declaring onKeyDown, you’re overriding the default key handler in order to
take action speciﬁc to your own activity. It’s always a good idea to pass the incoming
key to the parent class’s version of the method if it’s not something your activity
handles on its own.
Notice that when the keyCode matches the center button, you return true.
This is how you tell the Android activity and views that the key has been correctly
handled and shouldn’t be passed on to anyone else. Otherwise, you allow the activ-
ity superclass to handle the key. This may not seem like a big deal now, but it will
become much more important as your Android activities become more complex.

LAUNCHING THE ACTIVITY

Finally, it’s time to launch the new activity. This will start your brief foray into
intents. Each new activity is started as the result of a new intent being dispatched
into the system (which processes it and takes the appropriate action). In order to
start the ﬁrst activity, you’ll need a reference of your application context and the
class object for your new activity. Let’s create the new intent ﬁrst.

1. Place the following code into your onKeyDown key handling method:
Intent startIntent=new Intent(
this.getApplicationContext(),
NewActivity.class);

You’re passing the new intent an application context and the class object of
the activity that you would like to launch. This tells Android exactly where to
look in the application package. There are many ways to create and interact
with intents; this is, however, the simplest way to start up a new activity.
Once the intent is properly constructed, it’s simply a matter of telling the
Android system that you’d like to start the new activity.

2. Put the following line into your key handling method:

startActivity(startIntent);

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 29

FIGURE 2.1 Here is your new
activity!

Your onKeyDown handler should look like the following:

public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event){
if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_CENTER){
Intent startIntent=new Intent(this, NewActivity.class);
startActivity(startIntent);
return true;
}
return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

NOTE: Throughout this whole process, the original activity has never
once had access to the instance of the new activity. Any information
that might pass between these two activities must go through the
intermediary intent. You’ll learn how this is done in the next section.

TRYING IT OUT
If you’re running Eclipse and you’ve been coding along with me, it should now be
a simple matter of spinning up the emulator and installing your new activity (the
steps for which you should remember from Chapter 1). Once your new application
has launched, press the center key to see the results of all your labor (Figure 2.1).
Now that you know how to create and launch a new activity, it’s time to discuss
how that process works. You’ll need to understand, for the purposes of UI layout
and data management/retention later, what methods are called each time one of
your activities makes its way onto, and oﬀ of, the screen.

30 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

GETTING INTENTS

Intents can take a myriad of forms.

You use them anytime you need to start an activity or service. Further, you’ll
frequently use intents for system-wide communication. For example, you
can receive notifications about power system changes by registering for a
widely published intent. If one of your activities registers for an intent in the
manifest (for example, com.haseman.peachPit.OhOhPickMe), then any applica-
tion anywhere on the phone can, if you make your activity public, launch
directly to your activity by calling
startActivity(new Intent(“com.haseman.peachPit.OhOhPickMe”));

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN ACTIVITY

It’s good to know early on that each activity lives a very short but exciting life. It
begins when an intent that your activity is registered to receive is broadcast to
the system. The system calls your activity’s constructor (while also starting your
application as necessary) before invoking the following methods on the activity,
in this order:

1. onCreate

2. onStart

3. onResume

When you implement an activity, it’s your job to extend the methods that make
up this lifecycle. The only one you are required to extend is onCreate. The others,
if you declare them, will be called in the lifecycle order.
Your activity is the top visible application, can draw to the screen, will receive
key events, and is generally the life of the party. When the user presses the Back key
from the activity, these corresponding methods are called in the following order:

1. onPause

2. onStop

3. onDestroy

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 31

THE SHORT, BRUTAL LIFE OF THE ACTIVITY

An activity’s life is an incredibly short one. They are constantly created and
destroyed, so it’s very important that you save no data in them that has any
relevance outside the screen your activity will control.

The following are all valid actions that will result in the destruction of
any activity:

1. The user rotated the device from portrait to landscape or vice versa.

2. The activity is no longer visible onscreen or the system is low on

resources.

3. It’s Tuesday.

4. The user has pressed the Back or Home buttons and left your application.

Again, make sure the data members of your activity pertain only to the ele-
ments on the screen. Further, don’t expect the activity to save any data for
you. You’ll learn strategies to handle this in later chapters.

After these methods have executed, your activity is closed down and should
be ready for garbage collection.
In order to make sense of the activity’s ﬂow, let’s quickly look over each lifecycle
method in detail. Remember that you must evoke the superclass call in each of these
methods (often before you do anything else) or Android will throw exceptions at you.

NOTE: onCreate is the only one of the application lifecycle methods that
you must implement. I’ve found, in most of my work with Android,
that I only end up implementing one or two of these methods depend-
ing on what each activity is responsible for.

PUBLIC VOID ONCREATE(BUNDLE ICICLE)

Android will call your declaration of this method as your activity is starting. Remem-
ber, however, that during the run of your application you may go through several
instances of each activity. If, for example, the user changes the screen orientation
from landscape to portrait, your activity will be destroyed and a new instance of
the same activity will be created and initialized.

32 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

If the title, say, for your activity is dynamic but will not change after the activity
is started, this method would be where you’d want to reach into the view hierarchy
and set up the title. This method is not the place to conﬁgure data that could change
while the app is in the background or when another activity is launched on top of it.
Further, if your app is running in the background and the system is running
low on resources, your application may be killed. If that happens, the onCreate
method will be called on a new instance of the same activity when your applica-
tion returns to the foreground.
The onCreate method is also your one and only chance to call setContentView
for your activity. This, as you saw earlier, is how you tell the system what layout
you’d like to use for this screen. You call setContentView once you can begin set-
ting data on the UI. This could be anything from setting the contents of lists to
TextViews or ImageViews.

PUBLIC VOID ONSTART()

When starting up, your onStart method is called immediately after onCreate. If
your app was put in the background (either by another application launching over
yours or the user pressing the Home button), onStart will be called as you resume
but before the activity can interact with the screen. I tend to avoid overriding
onStart unless there’s something speciﬁc I need to check when my application is
about to begin using the screen.

PUBLIC VOID ONRESUME()

onResume is the last method called in the activity lifecycle as your activity is allowed
access to the screen. If UI elements have changed while your activity was in the
background, this method is the place to make sure the UI and phone state are in sync.
When your activity is starting up, this method is called after onCreate and
onStart. When your activity is coming to the foreground again, reguardless of
what state it was in before, onResume will be called.

HOORAY, YOUR ACTIVITY IS NOW RUNNING!

After all this setup, conﬁguration, and work, your activity is now visible to the user.
Things are being clicked, data may be parsed and displayed, lists are scrolled, and
things are happening! At some point, however, the party must end (perhaps because
the user pressed the Back key) and you’ll need to wind things down.

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 33

ONPAUSE( )
onPause is the ﬁrst method called by the system as your application is leaving the
screen. If you have any processes or loops (animations, for example) that should
be running only while your activity is onscreen, the onPause method is the per-
fect place to stop them. onPause will be called on your activity if you’ve launched
another activity over the one you’re currently displaying.
Keep in mind that if the system needs resources, your process could be killed
anytime after the onPause method is called. This isn’t a normal occurrence, but
you need to be aware that it could happen.
The onPause method is important because it may be the only warning you get
that your activity (or even your entire application stack) is going away. It is in this
method that you should save any important information to disk, your database,
or the preferences.
Once your activity has actually left the screen, you’ll receive the next call in
the activity lifecycle.

ONSTOP( )
When Android calls your onStop method, it indicates that your activity has oﬃcially
left the screen. Further, onStop is called when the user is leaving your activity
to interact with another one. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your activity is
shutting down (although it could). You can only assume that the user has left your
activity for another one. If you’re doing any ongoing process from within your
activity that should run only while it’s active, this method is your chance to be a
good citizen and shut it down.

ONDESTROY( )
onDestroy is your last method call before oblivion. This is your last chance for
your activity to clean up its aﬀairs before it passes on to the great garbage collec-
tor in the sky.
Any background processes that your activity may have been running in the back-
ground (fetching/parsing data, for example) must be shut down on this method call.
However, just because onDestroy is called doesn’t mean that your activity will
be obliterated. So if you have a thread running, it may continue to run and take up
system resources even after the onDestroy method is called.

34 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

BONUS ROUND—DATA RETENTION METHODS
As mentioned earlier, your process can be killed at any point after onPause if the
system needs resources. The user, however, shouldn’t ever know that this culling
has occurred. In order to accomplish this, Android gives you two chances to save
your state data for later use.

ONSAVEINSTANCESTATE(BUNDLE OUTSTATE)
This method passes you a bundle object into which you can put any data that you’d
need to restore your activity to its current state at a later time. You’ll do this by
calling something like outState.putString or outState.putBoolean. Each stored
value requires a string key going in, and it requires the same string key to come back
out. You are responsible for overriding your own onSaveInstanceState method.
If you’ve declared it, the system will call it; otherwise, you’ve missed your chance.
When your previously killed activity is restored, the system will call
your onCreate method again and hand back to you the bundle you built with
onSaveInstanceState.
onSaveInstanceState will only be called if the system thinks you may have to
restore your activity later. It wouldn’t be called if, for example, the user has pressed
the Back key, as the device clearly has no need to resume this exact activity later.
As such, this method is not the place for saving user data. Only stash temporary
information that is important to the UI on this particular instance of the screen.

ONRETAINNONCONFIGURATIONINSTANCE( )
When the user switches between portrait and landscape mode, your activity
is destroyed and a new instance of it is created (going through the full shut-
down-startup cycle of method calls). When your activity is destroyed and cre-
ated specifically because of a configuration change (the device rotation being
the most common), onRetainNonConfigurationInstance gives you a chance to
return any object that can be reclaimed in your new activity instance by calling
getLastNonConfigurationInstance.
This tactic helps to make screen rotation transitions faster. Keep this in mind
if it takes your activity a significant amount of time to acquire data that it plans
on displaying to the screen. Instead, you can get the previously displayed data by
using getLastNonConfigurationInstance.

THE ACTIVITY CLASS 35

KEEP IT SIMPLE, SMARTY

By now you know that activities can be killed off with very little notice. The
onSaveInstanceState gives you a chance to save primitives for later use. This
means, unequivocally, that your entire activity must be able to collapse all its
important information into a series of primitives. This further reinforces the
notion that activities must be very simple and cannot contain any complex
data important to the application outside itself. Avoid keeping large Java col-
lections filled with data in your activity, as it may be terminated with very
little notice.

You should now have a basic understanding of

䊏 Steps for creating a new activity
䊏 How an activity is started
䊏 The lifecycle of an activity

You have what you need to keep up as I go over more complex topics in later
chapters. Fear not, I’ll come back to the activity in no time.

36 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

THE INTENT CLASS

An intent is a class. Intents, in the Android platform, make up the major commu-
nication protocol for moving information between application components. In
a well-designed Android application, components (activity, content provider, or
service) should never directly access an instance of any other component. As such,
intents are how these pieces are able to communicate.
A good half of this book could be dedicated to the creation, use, and details of
the Intent class. For the sake of brevity and getting you up and running as fast as
possible, I’ll cover only a few basics in this chapter. Look for intents throughout the
rest of this book. They’re probably the most often used class in Android as a whole.
There are two main ways to tell the Android system that you’d like to receive
intents sent out by the system, by other applications, or even by your own app:
䊏 Registering an <intent-filter> in the AndroidManifest.xml ﬁle
䊏 Registering an IntentFilter object at runtime with the system

In each case, you need to tell the Android system what events you want to
listen for.
There are huge heaping numbers of ways to send intents as well. You can broad-
cast them out to the system as a whole, or you can target them to a speciﬁc activity
or service. However, in order to start a service or activity, it must be registered in
the manifest (you saw an example of this in the previous demonstration on start-
ing a new activity).
Let’s take a look at how to use intents in practice.

MANIFEST REGISTRATION
Why not register everything at runtime? If an intent is declared as part of your
manifest, the system will start your component so that it will receive it. Registra-
tion at runtime presupposes that you are already running. For this reason, anytime
you want your application to awaken and take action based on an event, declare it
in your manifest. If it’s something your application should receive only while it’s
running, register an IntentFilter (it’s an intent-filter when declared in XML,
but an IntentFilter in your Java code) once your particular component has started.

THE INTENT CLASS 37

Let’s go back to the initial application and look again at the activity’s entry in
the manifest:

The android.intent.action.MAIN declaration tells the system that this activity

is the main activity for your application. No parameters are needed to start it. It’s
a good idea to list only one activity as MAIN in the manifest. This is also how adb
(the Android debug bridge), when you run your application from Eclipse, knows
which activity to start up.
The android.intent.category.LAUNCHER category tells the system that the
enclosing activity should be launched when your icon is clicked on the main phone’s
application dock. Further, it tells Android that you’d like the icon to appear in the
app launcher drawer. This is an example of an intent-filter that’s created for
you by Android’s project creation tools. Let’s add one of our own.

ADDING AN INTENT
If you skipped the previous section about the Activity class, now may be a good
time to go back and at least skim over the code. In that section, I showed you how
to declare and launch a simple new activity. What I didn’t show you, however,
was how to make that activity accessible to the system as a whole by declaring an
<intent-filter> for it within your manifest. Let’s do that now.

1. Add an intent-filter to the NewActivity declaration:

38 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

In this code, you’ve registered for intents containing the com.haseman.

PURPLE_PONY_POWER action and set the intent-filter category to default.

Now, lest you think I’m a crazed children’s toy enthusiast, I’ve used this
rather absurdist action string to demonstrate a point—namely, that the
only requirement for the action string is that it be unique for your particular
component.

In the previous section, I showed you how to launch the new activity by
using the following lines:
Intent startIntent=new Intent(this, NewActivity.class);
startActivity(startIntent);

This works, but it has one major limitation: It cannot be launched out-
side your own application’s context. This renders useless one of the most
powerful features that the activity-intent model has to oﬀer. Namely, any
application on the device, with the right intent, can use components within
your application.

Now that you’ve added the <intent-filter> to the sample project manifest,
you can launch this particular activity anywhere with the following code:
Intent actionStartIntent= new Intent
p (“com.haseman.PURPLE_PONY_POWER”);
startActivity(actionStartIntent);

Notice a very important diﬀerence between this code and the listing above it.
When you create the intent in this example, you’re not required to pass in a
Context object (the bundle of information that is required to communicate
with the system at large). This allows any application, with knowledge of
the required intents, to start the NewActivity class.

THE INTENT CLASS 39

2. Add the highlighted code to the onKeyDown handler to launch the same activ-
ity in a diﬀerent way. Here’s how the new OnKeyDown method should look:
public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event){
if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_CENTER){
Intent startIntent=new Intent(this,
p NewActivity.class);
startActivity(startIntent);
return true;
}
if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_DOWN){
Intent actionStartIntent=
new Intent(“com.haseman.PURPLE_PONY_POWER”);
startActivity(actionStartIntent);
}
return super.onKeyDown(keyCode, event);
}

Now, when you press the down key in the sample application, you’ll see the
same activity launching using this new manifest-declared intent-filter.

If you’ve misspelled the intent’s action string or neglected to add the default
category to your intent-filter, you may get an android.content.Activity
NotFoundException.
This exception will be thrown by the startActivity method anytime you
create an intent that the system cannot connect to an activity listed in a manifest
on the device.
Registering for intent ﬁlters is not only the purview of the activity. Any Android
application component can register to be started when an intent action is broadcast
by the system.

40 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

MANY INTENTS, ONE ACTIVITY

One activity may register to receive any number of events. Typically, sending an intent is akin to telling the
activity “do this one thing!” That “one thing” can be anything from editing a file to displaying a list of pos-
sible files or actions. Again, as we’ve discussed, it’s important to limit the scope of your activity, so register-
ing for only one intent is often a good idea. However, because your activity could be registered for more
than one intent, it’s a good idea to call getIntent inside your onCreate method and check why you’re being
started so you can take the right action (by calling getAction).

LISTENING FOR INTENTS AT RUNTIME

Another method for receiving events that pertain only to your application or for receiv-
ing events broadcast by the Android system itself is to listen for the intents at runtime.
Let’s say that your activity would like to show a special screen or take a custom
action when the user enables Airplane mode. To do this, you’ll need to create a
temporary IntentFilter and an inner BroadcastReceiver object instance.

CREATE A RECEIVER
Let’s add the runtime BroadcastReceiver to the MyActivity class. A Broadcast
Receiver is, as you can probably guess, an object with a single onReceive method.
Change the MyActivity class to look like the following:

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

private BroadcastReceiver simpleReceiver=new BroadcastReceiver() {
public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
if(intent.getAction().equals(
Intent.ACTION_AIRPLANE_MODE_CHANGED)){
Toast.makeText(context,
R.string.airplane_change,
Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}
}
};
//Rest of the Activity is here.
}
THE INTENT CLASS 41
In this code, you are creating a locally accessible receiver for use within the
activity. When the system calls onReceive, you’ll need to check what the intent’s
action is. This is a good idea, as BroadcastReceiver could register for any number
of diﬀerent intents.
When you receive the event that you’re looking for, you’ll use Android’s Toast
API to print a simple message on the screen (in this case, the contents of the string
named airplane_change). In practice, this might be the time to show a screen
indicating that network connectivity is required for the application to run correctly.

TELL ANDROID WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR

Now that you’ve created a BroadcastReceiver, you can register it with the system.
I’ll show you the code ﬁrst and then go over what’s happening:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
IntentFilter intentFilter = new IntentFilter();
intentFilter.addAction(Intent.ACTION_AIRPLANE_MODE_CHANGED);
registerReceiver(simpleReceiver, intentFilter);
}

A TOAST?

A toast is a short message shown to the user in a small pop-up along the
bottom of the screen. This is a reference, as far as I can tell, to the short
speech given before glasses are raised, tapped together, and then partaken
of. As always with toasts, the shorter and simpler the better.

42 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

Again, this is in the original MyActivity class made by the SDK when you cre-
ated the project.

1. In the onCreate method, create an intent ﬁlter and add the action Intent.
ACTION_AIRPLANE_MODE_CHANGED to it.

2. Add as many actions to this intent ﬁlter as you wish. When your receiver is
called, you’ll have to sort out which intent actually triggered the Broadcast
Receiver’s onReceive method by calling getAction() on the intent.

3. Test the code by holding the power button down; this will pop up a dialog
with several options.

4. Enable Airplane mode. If you’ve done everything right so far, you should
see a small message pop up along the bottom of the screen with your alert
message in it.

This is going to be the primary way in which your applications will listen for
information on the status of the system. Everything from the status of the battery
to the status of the Wi-Fi radio is at your ﬁngertips with this tool. You can ﬁnd out
more about what activities you can monitor, with what permissions, by looking
in the Android SDK documentation.

REMEMBER TO STOP LISTENING

For every runtime registration that you create, you must also unregister it. If you
would like to receive the events only when your activity is visible, onPause is the
best place to turn oﬀ the receiver. If you’d like to listen for as long as your activity is
running, even if it’s not visible, you’ll want to unregister in onDestroy. Wherever you
decide to stop listening, simply call unregisterReceiver (a method implemented
by your superclass) and pass in the BroadcastReceiver you created earlier, like this:

@Override
public void onDestroy(){
super.onDestroy();
unregisterReceiver(imageReceiver);
}

THE INTENT CLASS 43

FIGURE 2.2 Do you want to
open that YouTube link in the
browser or the app?

CREATING SELF-CONTAINED BROADCAST RECEIVERS

A broadcast receiver doesn’t have to exist inside an activity. You can register a
receiver if you want to know about a system event but might not need to start your
full application when it occurs.
BroadcastReceivers can be registered on their own under the <receiver> tag.
In practice, I use these as a way to receive information about the system that may
not require showing something to the user. Starting an activity only to shut it down
if it’s not needed is much more resource expensive than grabbing the broadcast
intent with a receiver and then starting up an activity only when needed.

HANDLING COLLIDING ACTIVITIES

You may be thinking to yourself “Self, what happens when more than one activ-
ity is registered for the same intent?” This is a very interesting question, one that
Android resolves simply by asking the user.
If two activities listen for the same intent in their manifests, and an application
attempts to start an activity with that intent, the system will pop up a menu giving
users a list of possible applications to choose from (Figure 2.2).
You’ve probably seen similar behavior hundreds of times on your desktop com-
puter, such as when opening a ﬁle and being given a choice about which application
you’d like to open it with.

44 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

FIGURE 2.3 What happens
when you share my funny-
looking Android avatar?

This notion of many activities registering for the same intent can have delightful
side eﬀects. In Android, any application can register to share media with a given
MIME time by using the android.intent.action.SEND action.
Figure 2.3 is what the Share tab on my phone looks like when I press it in the
image gallery.
It is this ability to register for similar intents that allows seamless interaction as
each application registering this intent is given an entry on the Share menu. Click-
ing an entry in this list will start the registered activity and pass along as an extra
the location at which the image can be accessed. What is an extra? Good question.

MOVING YOUR OWN DATA

One of the major features of the intent is the ability to package and send data along
with it. One activity should never directly manipulate the memory of another.
However, they still must have a way to communicate information. This commu-
nication is accomplished with the help of the intent’s Extra bundle. The bundle
can hold any number of string-primitive pairs. Perhaps the best way to illustrate
this concept is with some code and an example.
Earlier, I showed you how to start a new activity by using an action-based
broadcast intent.

THE INTENT CLASS 45

Add the following highlighted code to the onKeyDown listener that you’ve dealt
with before:

public boolean onKeyDown(int keyCode, KeyEvent event){

//...previous keycode code skipped...
if(keyCode == KeyEvent.KEYCODE_DPAD_DOWN){
Intent actionStartIntent= new Intent(“com.haseman.
p PURPLE_PONY_POWER”);
actionStartIntent.putExtra(“newBodyText”,
“You Pressed the Down Key!”);
startActivity(actionStartIntent);
}

You’re adding a string payload to the intent before using it to start an activity.
Whoever receives the intent will be able to pull this string out (assuming they know
it’s there) and use it as they see ﬁt. Now that you know how to attach the data,
let’s take a look at an example of retrieving and using the string in NewActivity’s
onCreate method:

public void onCreate(Bundle icicle){

super.onCreate(icicle);
setContentView(R.layout.new_activity);
Intent currentIntent = getIntent();
if(currentIntent.hasExtra(“newBodyText”)){
String newText = currentIntent.getExtras().
p getString(“newBodyText”);
TextView bodyView = (TextView)findViewById(
R.id.new_activity_text_view);
bodyView.setText(newText);
}

46 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

In the highlighted code, I’m getting the intent that was responsible for starting
my NewActivity by calling getIntent. Next, I’m checking if this intent actually
contains the newBodyText extra. Keep in mind that the intent may not contain the
extra. If you forget to check for this case, you’ll quickly ﬁnd yourself inundated
with NullPointerExceptions. If the extra is there, I’ll pull it out and set the string
as the new text in my display. The last two lines obtain a reference to the screen’s
text view and change the text to be the contents of the extra. Don’t worry about
the mechanics of that particular operation right now; you’ll learn more about this
topic in depth later.

REVIEWING INTENTS
You’ve learned how to register for, create, and use the basic functionality of an
intent. As you now know, they can be registered for in the manifest or at runtime.
They can be sent by any application on the phone, and any number of application
components can register for the same intent.
The goal in this section was to get you started on the care and feeding of Android
intents. In future chapters and tasks, you’ll work with intents again in many dif-
ferent contexts.

THE INTENT CLASS 47

THE APPLICATION CLASS

Typically, an Android application is a collection of activities, broadcast receivers,

services, and content providers. The Application class is the glue that binds all
these disparate pieces into a singular, uniﬁed entity. Every time a content provider,
activity, service, or intent receiver in your manifest is initialized, an Application
class is also spun up and available to it.

THE DEFAULT APPLICATION DECLARATION

Looking in the AndroidManifest.xml ﬁle, you’ll see a typical Application declara-
tion that looks like the following:

Here you can see the <application> tag. This part of the manifest typically
contains information relevant to your application at large. android:icon tells the
system what icon to display in the main application list. android:label in this case
refers to another entry in the strings.xml ﬁle you were editing earlier.

CUSTOMIZING YOUR OWN APPLICATION

Adding your own application is very similar to the steps you’ve already gone through
to add a new activity.

1. Add a name ﬁeld to the existing AndroidManifest.xml declaration.

2. Create a new class in your package that extends the Application class.

3. Proﬁt!

Let’s go over steps 1 and 2 in depth. You’re on your own for step 3.

THE NAME
When it comes to the manifest, android:name refers not to the name of the object
being described, but to the location of the class in your Java package. The Application
declaration is no exception. Here’s what the opening tag of the application should
look like with the new declaration:

48 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

In this declaration, you tell the system what icon you want to represent your
application on the Android application drawer.
Once again, the class loader will look for your Application class by appending
the contents of android:name to the end of your package declaration within the
<manifest> opening tag. Now you’ll need to actually create this class to keep the class
loader from getting unhappy.

THE APPLICATION CLASS

Here’s what you’ll need, at a very basic level, to have an Application of your very own:

import android.app.Application;
public class SampleApplication extends Application{
public void onCreate(){
super.onCreate();
}
}

The Application can be a very simple class. It’s hard to understand what the
Application can do for you until you consider a few things:

䊏 Activities are very transient.

䊏 Activities have no access to each other’s memory, and they should com-
municate through intents.
䊏 As activities are constantly being stopped and started for a variety of reasons,
there’s no way for your activity to know if it’s being started for the very
ﬁrst time in the run of your application. The Application class’s onCreate
method, on the other hand, is called only when your app is being initialized.
As such, it can be a good place to take actions that should happen only when
your application is ﬁrst started.

THE APPLICATION CLASS 49

If you need a temporary holding pen for data that may span many activities, a
data member that’s part of the Application can be a convenient place to store it.
You must be very careful about adding data to the Application. Any single compo-
nent declared in your manifest, from the simplest BroadcastReceiver to the most
complex activity, will, before it’s created by the system, ﬁrst create your Application
object. This means you must make the Application’s onCreate method run as
fast as you possibly can.

ACCESSING THE APPLICATION

All your broadcast receivers, services, activities, and content providers have a
method called getApplication provided to them by the appropriate superclass.
When invoked, getApplication will return a pointer to your Application object if
you speciﬁed one in the manifest. Getting access to it, now that you’ve declared and
created the class, is as simple as calling getApplication and casting the returned
object to an instance of your own pointer. Here’s what it looks like:

SampleApplication myApplication = (SampleApplication)

getApplication();

That’s all there is to it. You can add public data members or context-sensitive
methods to your own version of the Application, and with one call all your com-
ponents will have access to the same object, like so:

public class SampleApplication extends Application{

public String username;
public void onCreate(){
super.onCreate();
}
}

50 CHAPTER 2 EXPLORING THE APPLICATION BASICS

To access your newly added variable, simply do the object cast listed earlier:

public void onCreate(Bundle bundle){

SampleApplication myApplication =
(SampleApplication)getApplication();
myApplication.username = “sparks”;
}

Be sure that any data you put in the Application is relevant everywhere, because
the overhead for allocating and initializing the Application can become a drag
on startup times.

WRAPPING UP
Over the course of this chapter, I’ve exposed you to the fundamental building
blocks of an Android application. I used examples to get you started on
䊏 The manifest
䊏 Creating and using your own activities
䊏 Sending, receiving, and taking advantage of intents
䊏 Creating your own Application object

It’s my hope that through the rest of the book, you’ll be able to use the building
blocks you’ve learned in this chapter to understand how an Android application
functions. From here on out, I’ll be focusing more on how to do tasks rather than
on the theories that back them. On that note, let’s start making screens that include
more than just a single text view.

WRAPPING UP 51
3
CREATING USER
INTERFACES
Creating an intuitive, good-looking
d-lo
ooking interface iiss
one of the most importantt aspects
spects of a successful Android
Android
application. It doesn’t matter
atter how wonderful your code is
if the user cannot easily ﬁnd and use the features you’ve worked
so hard to create. While Android’s diversity may give your appli-
cation access to a greater pool of devices, you must also contend
with making sure your application correctly supports all those
screen sizes.

Fortunately, Android gives developers many tools to make the

process as straightforward as possible. In this chapter, you’ll learn
about all but one of the major building blocks for displaying infor-
mation. The one major omission is the ListView class, which will
be covered in a chapter of its own.

53
THE VIEW CLASS

No, this isn’t a television show where several women debate the merits of com-
mon culture. The View class is the superclass for all the Android display objects.
Each and every user interface (UI) class from the simple ImageView to the mighty
RelativeLayout all subclass from this same object. In this section, you’ll learn the
basics of creating, adding, and modifying your existing layouts using Java code and
XML. You’ll also learn to create your own custom view. A view, at its very core, is
simply a rectangle into which you can display something. Subclasses take many
diﬀerent forms, but they all need, simply, a space to show something to the user.

CREATING A VIEW
Creating a new view is something you’ve already done. In Chapter 1, you added
a view to an XML layout file as part of exploring how to launch a new activity. At
the time, I told you we’d get into the specifics of how these views were created and
modified, and, well, now’s the time! Let’s take a look at the default views generated
for you automatically when you create a new Android project.

VIEWS IN XML
Here’s what the default XML layout looks like in a new project:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

54 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

HEIGHT AND WIDTH ARE REQUIRED

For now, it’s important to note that every single layout must have a value set
for both its height and its width. Android may not fail to compile if you do
not specify these values (as they could be updated at runtime), but if it starts
to draw your views and the system height and width values are missing, then
your application will crash.

Question: Which of the two elements (LinearLayout and TextView) in this

default XML layout are views?
Answer: Both.
All visual objects onscreen subclass from the View class. If you go high enough
in the inheritance chain, you’ll ﬁnd an “extends View” somewhere.
In the default XML layout, the Android tools have added a simple TextView
contained inside a LinearLayout. When displayed onscreen, the contents of the
hello string will appear by default in the upper-left corner of the screen. I’ll discuss
how to position visual elements onscreen later in this chapter.
To display the XML layout onscreen, you need to call the setContentView()
method and pass the name of the layout to the activity.
In Eclipse, your code editor, it should look like this:

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
}

In this code, you’re telling the activity that you want it to inﬂate and render
the main layout for this activity. By inﬂating, I mean the conversion from the XML
in the project to a Java object that can be told to draw on the screen. You might be
thinking, “Is it possible to build and display a layout and view within Java alone?
Can I skip layout in XML entirely and go straight to the source?” Yes, you can, but
in practice you shouldn’t. Even so, understanding how to build a layout without
the XML will help you potentially modify any aspect of your layout at runtime.

THE VIEW CLASS 55

VIEWS IN JAVA
Anything you can lay out or build in XML, you can lay out and build also within
the Java code itself; it’s just more complex. It’s important, however, to understand
what Android is doing as it inﬂates and builds your layouts.
Here’s what the Java code looks like to build the exact same user interface that
Android generates for you in XML when you create a new project:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(buildLayouts());
}
public View buildLayouts(){
LinearLayout topView =
new LinearLayout(getApplicationContext());
LayoutParams topLayoutParams =
new FrameLayout.LayoutParams
(LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT,
LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT);
topView.setLayoutParams(topLayoutParams);
TextView textView =
new TextView(getApplicationContext());
LinearLayout.LayoutParams textLayoutParams =
new LinearLayout.LayoutParams(
LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT,
LayoutParams.MATCH_PARENT);
textView.setLayoutParams(textLayoutParams);
textView.setText(R.string.hello);
topView.addView(textView);
return topView;
}

56 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

SPECIAL DIMENSIONS

You are always required to give a height and width for every view in your
hierarchy. You may use, for these definitions in particular, four different
values. They are:
䊏 wrap_content makes the view big enough to match what it contains. This
might mean different things to different views, but the concept remains
the same.
䊏 fill_parent and match_parent values actually mean exactly the same
thing. Namely, I want the dimensions of this view to match the dimen-
sions of my parent view.
䊏 dip or dp stands for device-independent pixels. This is a value that will
give you a consistent spacing regardless of the screen density (pixels per
inch) of the device. On the Nexus 1 or Nexus S, 1 dp ~= 1.5 pixels.
䊏 px stands for pixels. There are times when exact pixel values are necessary.
I advise against using this to declare screen locations, but it’s an option.

Let’s look at what is happening in the Java code. Instead of calling setContent
View on an ID from the R.java file, I’m passing it an instance that the LinearLayout
object returned from the buildLayouts method. In the buildLayouts method,
I’m first creating a new LinearLayout (passing in the application’s context) and a
new LayoutParams object. To match what’s in the XML, the new LayoutParam is
initialized with both the width and the height set to MATCH_PARENT. If you have
done Android development before, you should know that MATCH_PARENT is exactly
the same as the previously used FILL_PARENT.
Once I have the layout parameters initialized for the top LinearLayout, I can
pass them to the object with a setLayoutParams call. I’ve now got the LinearLayout
configured, so it’s time to move on to building the TextView.
This is a simple text view, so its layout parameters are very similar to those of
its parent’s layout. The only noticeable difference is that I’m setting the height,
when creating the layout parameters, to scale to fit the natural size of the TextView.
(Much more on dynamic heights and widths soon.)
Once I’ve told the TextView how it will be positioned in its parent layout via
the layout parameters, I tell it which string I’d like to display. This string is defined
in /res/values/strings.xml. The name attribute in XML determines what needs

THE VIEW CLASS 57

to appear after R.string for the system to locate your resource. You’ll learn much
more about resource management in the next section.
Last, I need to add the new TextView into the LinearLayout and then return the
LinearLayout so it can be set as the main content view for the activity. Once that’s
ﬁnished, I have a layout constructed at runtime with Java code, which identically
matches the layout provided by the system in XML form.
The Java code looks fairly straightforward, but XML is a much better idea for
working with the layout. Using XML, you can use Android’s resource management
system and give non-software engineers the ability to modify the application UI.

ALTERING THE UI AT RUNTIME

It’s one thing to use XML or Java to deﬁne the pile of views that compose your user
interface. But particularly in the XML case, you’ll want to be able to retrieve and
alter views with data acquired over the network, from the user, or from any other
information source. Android provides a simple method for gaining access to the
views that currently compose your screens by calling findViewById, which is an
Activity class method.

IDENTIFYING YOUR VIEWS

Before you can ﬁnd one of your views at runtime, you’ll need to give it an ID. Once
you’ve called setContentView on an activity, you can call findViewById to retrieve
your views and then alter them. This process should look at least a little bit familiar,
because you saw it in the previous chapter. Here’s what it looks like in XML:

58 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

In this case, I’ve added an android:id line to name the TextView. The @+
notation tells Android that rather than referring to a view, you’d like to create an
ID for the view. The first reference to any ID must start with @+id. Subsequent
references to that ID will start simply with @id.
Android keeps its own reserved IDs name-space. For example, if you’re creat-
ing a layout to be used by ListActivity (an activity specifically designed to show
lists of information), you’ll want to set the ID on your main onscreen ListView to
“android:id=”@id/android:list”. These well-known IDs allow Android’s system
code to correctly find and interact with the list view that you specify. I’ll provide you
with more on this subject in Chapter 5, which covers list creation and management.
If you’re creating a view at runtime, simply call setId and pass in an integer,
and you’ll be able to retrieve it later.

FINDING YOUR RESOURCES WITH ANDROID

When Android compiles your project, it assigns a number value for your new static
numeric ID. It places this new ID in the R.java file within your project. This file is your
gateway to everything you’ve defined inside the res folder. For every layout, drawable,
and identified view—and for a host of other things—Android places a subsequent
statically defined int into the R file that identifies those things. Anytime you add a line
to your layout XML defining a new ID (for example, android:id=”@+id/my_new_id”),
you’ll find that after the next time you compile your project, you’ll have an entry in
the R.id class. In the previous example, this entry would be R.id.my_new_id.

RETRIEVING A VIEW
Getting the existing instance of an Android view is as simple as calling findViewById
and passing in the ID value found in the R.java ﬁle. Given the earlier XML example,
here’s how you would grab an instance of the text view and modify its contents.

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
TextView tv = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.text_holder);
if(tv!=null)
tv.setText(R.string.hello);
}

THE VIEW CLASS 59

If you are reading this book in order, this should look eerily familiar. I’m retriev-
ing an instance of the text view as described by the layout XML. Remember that
calling findViewById only works after you’ve called setContentView within the
onCreate method. Also, it’s always a good idea to check for null to make sure the
system was able to retrieve what you’re looking for. Later layouts for different screen
configurations may not have all the views your current layout does. Think of it as
future-proofing your UI code for different landscape layouts.

KEEPING YOUR VIEWS AROUND

Calling findViewById will return an object that persists for the duration of your
activity. This means you can add private data members to your Activity class to
reduce the number of times you need to reach into the view hierarchy and ﬁnd
them. If you modify a view only once or twice during the lifetime of your activity,
this trick won’t save you much time, but it can save signiﬁcant time if you’re mak-
ing frequent updates to multiple views on a very complex screen.
It’s a very bad idea, however, to keep your views hanging around once your
activity’s onDestroy method has been invoked by the system. Making changes to
a view that was once part of an expired activity will have dire consequences (force
close dialogs, grumpy users, bad market reviews).

XML VS. JAVA LAYOUTS

On the whole, laying out your view in Java is nearly as simple as writing it out in
XML. So, why would you put any layouts in XML?
The short answer is that Android has systems in place to load diﬀerent XML
layouts for you depending on the deployment device screen size and conﬁguration.
Do all this work in Java and you won’t be able to take advantage of this massive
time saver. Also, it takes a programmer to modify Java code, but most designers
can beat the XML layouts into displayable shape. Although you might be the only
one working on your current project, this will not be true for all your projects.
The longer answer to the question of XML versus Java layouts will become clear
as you read the “Resource Management” section.

60 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

HANDLING A FEW COMMON TASKS
Some tasks are more common than others. Let’s take a look at how you can handle
some of the ones that you’ll do a few dozen times before you ﬁnish your ﬁrst
application.

CHANGING THE VISIBILITY OF A VIEW

Most of the time, if you want to deﬁne your UI in XML you’ll need to add views
that will be visible only some of the time.

TIP: If you find yourself doing this a lot, be sure

to check out the ViewStub class.

Depending on how dynamic your application is, views come and go fairly regu-
larly. Showing and hiding views is as simple as using the ever trusty findViewById
and then calling setVisibility on the returned object:

Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.sample_button);

//Cycle through the View Visibility settings
if(button != null){
//Gone (no impact on layouts)
button.setVisibility(View.GONE);
//Invisible (holds its space in a layout but is not drawn)
button.setVsibility(View.INVISIBLE);
//Visible (duh)
button.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
}

This code has three visibility settings. GONE and VISIBLE are the most obvious.
You’ll ﬁnd yourself using INVISIBLE less often, however it’s great for keeping all
the other views inside your layouts from moving around when you want to hide
something.

THE VIEW CLASS 61

SETTING AN ONCLICKLISTENER
Setting up a listener to tell you that one of your views has been clicked is one of the
most common tasks you’ll do when working on an Android application. A click can
mean the user moved focus to your view using the navigation pad or trackball and
then clicked the select key. A click can also mean pressing on the trackball, if there’s
one of those, or on the key in the center of the four- or eight-way directional pad.
Your click listener will also be called if, in touch mode, the user taps their finger
down on your view and then lifts up with their finger still within the bounds of the
view. This is an important distinction, as your click listener will not be invoked
when their finger actually clicks down on the view but rather when the user lifts
their finger up. This gives the user the chance to put a finger down in the wrong
place and then correct the position before lifting it.
You can track view clicks in several ways. You can declare that your activity
itself implements the view’s OnClickListener interface, add a public void onClick
(View v) method, and pass a pointer to your activity to the view you wish to track.
Here’s what that looks like in code for theoretical buttons with IDs button_one and
button_two declared in an imaginary main.xml layout file:

public class UiDemoActivity extends Activity implements

p OnClickListener {
@Override
public void onClick(View selectedView) {
if(selectedView.getId() == R.id.button_one){
//Take Button One actions
}
if(selectedView.getId() == R.id.button_one){
//Take Button Two actions
}
}
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);

62 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.button_one);
if(button != null)
button.setOnClickListener(this);
Button button_two = (Button)findViewById(R.id.button_two);
if(button_two!= null)
button_two.setOnClickListener(this);
}

There are two methods at work here. In the onCreate method that is called when
the activity is being initialized, you’ll see me pulling button_one and button_two
out of the layout with findViewById. If the system correctly returned an instance,
I register my activity (passing in a pointer to the activity with “this”) as the click
listener for each view.
Registering a click listener with a view does two things. First, it tells the system
to call the appropriate onClick method. Second, it tells the system that this view
accepts both focus (highlightable by the navigation buttons) and touch events. You
can switch these states on or oﬀ by yourself with code, but setting a click listener
ensures that click events can actually be heard by the view.
There’s a second way to set up the same dynamic. This method sets up a new
OnClickListener object for each view. This can help keep code separate if your
screen has a lot of clickable items on it. Here’s what this pattern looks like, and it
achieves the same results as the previous code.

public class UiDemoActivity extends Activity{

private View.OnClickListener mClickListenerOne =
new View.OnClickListener() {
@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
//Do button one stuff here
}
};
private View.OnClickListener mClickListenerTwo =

THE VIEW CLASS 63

new View.OnClickListener() {
@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
//Do button two stuff here
}
};
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.button_one);
if(button != null)
button.setOnClickListener(mClickListenerOne);
Button button_two = (Button)findViewById(R.id.button_two);
if(button_two!= null)
button_two.setOnClickListener(mClickListenerTwo);
}
}

This time, instead of declaring my activity as an implementer of the OnClick

Listener, I’m creating two separate inner objects to handle the click event from
each individual button. I’ll put the code required for button_one in the ﬁrst object
and the code for button_two in the second. I do this frequently in my own appli-
cations when I have several buttons on the screen. It keeps me from having one
heaping pile of if statements (or one switch statement) that ﬁgure out which view
was clicked and then take the appropriate action.
Depending on your needs, you can mix and match two techniques. There isn’t
a huge advantage either way, but it’s good to know each so you can keep your code
in good order.

64 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

In this example, I’ve added a click listener to two buttons. A click listener can
be attached to any view that you want users to interact with. This can be anything
from entire view groups to simple text views.
It’s worth mentioning again that by setting a click listener, you’re telling the
system that the item can be selected (touched with a ﬁnger) and clicked (highlighted
with the trackpad and then clicked with the center key or trackball). As a result,
whatever default selection action is conﬁgured for the view will automatically run
on a select event (either from the directional keypad or the touchscreen). Buttons,
for example, change colors when a user selects them. Text views, depending on
the device’s default UI style, may also change the active color of the text. In the
end, you can (and probably should) specify custom display behavior by declaring
a state-full drawable. I’ll show you how to do such things later in the book.

CREATING CUSTOM VIEWS

The concept of custom views can really be broken out into two sections: extending an
existing view and creating an entirely new one. I’ve rarely, in my career as an Android
developer, created a completely custom view, so we’ll skip over it here. The Android
SDK documentation has directions for the industrious among you who want to roll
your very own from scratch. However, even if you plan to extend an Android view, you
must create a new class that extends the existing view. Here’s how you’d go about it.

DECLARING THE NEW CLASS

The ﬁrst step in declaring a custom view is to create the class. Android allows you
to subclass any of its existing UI objects simply by extending an existing class. The
declaration looks like this:

public class CustomTextView extends TextView{

public CustomTextView(Context context) {
super(context);
}
}

THE VIEW CLASS 65

That’s all it takes to create a custom text view. However, since there’s about as
much custom in this custom text view as there is beef in fast-food tacos, I’ll add
something simple to set it apart.

EXTENDING A VIEW
Although Android’s layouts and views are powerful and versatile, there are times
when they just won’t do exactly what you want. Fortunately, their functionality is
easy to extend. To demonstrate, I’ve written a custom text view that changes the
color of every letter in the text to be displayed onscreen. While this isn’t the most
practical use case, it will show how simple it is to implement your own behavior.

CUSTOMIZING AN EXTENDED VIEW

You’d be amazed at how much code it takes to correctly render text to the screen.
Android’s TextView.java class is nearly 5000 lines of code. But thanks to the
ability to extend a class, you can use all the complex layout code and customize
only the part that appeals to you. In this example, I catch the text as it changes and
add a new ForegroundColorSpan for each letter in the new string. First, I declare
an array of colors.

public class CustomTextView extends TextView{

int colorArray[] = new int[]{Color.WHITE,
Color.RED,
Color.YELLOW,
Color.GREEN,
Color.BLUE,
Color.MAGENTA,
Color.CYAN,
Color.DKGRAY};

66 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

Now, each time the text changes, I add a new ForegroundColorSpan for each letter.

protected void onTextChanged(CharSequence text,

int start, int before, int after )
{
//Keep the view from getting into an infinite loop
if(selfChange){
selfChange = false;
return;
}
selfChange=true;
}

I make sure I don’t get stuck in an inﬁnite loop (with the change in color trig-
gering another onTextChanged call, which changes the color again, which changes
the color . . . you get the idea). Next comes the code that changes the colors:

SpannableStringBuilder builder = new SpannableStringBuilder(text);

builder.clearSpans();
ForegroundColorSpan colorSpan;
int color;
for(int i=0; i < text.length(); i++){
//pick the next color
color = colorArray[i%colorArray.length];
//Create the color span
colorSpan = new ForegroundColorSpan(color);
//Add the color span for this one char
builder.setSpan(colorSpan,
i, i,
Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
}
setText(builder);

THE VIEW CLASS 67

Again, not very complex, but then neither is extending an existing view class.
Also, be warned that this code will clear any formatting that may have already
been set on the text. (At this point, don’t stress too much about how spans and
SpannableStringBuilders work. In short, they’re blocks of formatting that you can
drop over strings. Check the Android SDK documentation for more info.) If you’re
looking for a coding challenge, try creating an array with every possible RGB hex
color value and cycling through that array.

USING YOUR EXTENDED VIEW

Just as with any other Android view, you can create a new instance of it at runtime
in your Java code or pre-declare it in your XML layout ﬁle. Here’s how you can use
it in your activity:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
CustomTextView customView = new CustomTextView(this);
customView.setText(“Hello There!”);
setContentView(customView);
}

There’s nothing you haven’t seen before going on here. I’m creating a new
instance of my view, setting the text for it, and then setting it as the main view for
my activity. You could also put it inside a layout object with other views. It’s also
possible to add this custom view to an XML-described layout. But before you can
start declaring your custom view in an XML ﬁle, you need to create the full suite
of View constructors. Your custom view should look something like this:

public class CustomTextView extends TextView{

public CustomTextView(Context context,
AttributeSet attributeSet,
int defSytle)
{
super(context, attributeSet, defSytle);
}

68 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

public CustomTextView(Context context,
AttributeSet attributeSet)
{
super(context, attributeSet);
}
public CustomTextView(Context context){
super(context);
}
//Rest of the class omitted for brevity
}

When Android parses your XML layout and creates your view, it needs to pass
an attribute set to the constructor because this contains all the layout informa-
tion, text, and whatever else you’ve added that starts with android. If you forget
to add these, everything will compile, but it will show the Unexpected Force Close
window of doom when you try to draw the screen.
Now that you have the correct constructors, it’s possible to create and lay out
your custom view within XML. In the code to follow, I’ve added a single instance
of the rainbow animating custom text display.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

THE VIEW CLASS 69

As you can see, adding a custom text view to your XML layouts only requires
you to use the full Java package and class name. You can also see that because
CustomTextView extends TextView, I can use any attribute (like android:text)
that I would use with one of Android’s TextViews.
Congrats, you’ve created a custom Android view to do your bidding in only a few
lines of code, you’ve displayed it to the screen, and you even have the capability to
include it within a more complex layout system. Google has done a fantastic job of
allowing developers to extend the functionality of basic building blocks included
in the Android SDK. If this extended custom view leaves you wanting more of a
challenge, try making a simple text view that does exactly the same things as the
extended view. You’ll need to explore the onMeasure and onDraw methods of your
own view. Go ahead, check it out, I’ll be here when you get back.

70 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Android has many tools to help you manage string literals, images, layouts, and
more. Moving all this constant data into external ﬁles makes life as a programmer
easier in a multitude of ways. In previous code examples, I’ve referenced the R.java
ﬁle when specifying strings, drawable images, and layouts and mentioned that an
explanation would be forthcoming. Now is the time to explain Android resource
management in detail.

RESOURCE FOLDER OVERVIEW

Every Android project, by default, contains a res folder with several subfolders
inside it. Each subfolder is responsible for a different aspect of your application’s data.
The drawable folders (drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi, and drawable-ldpi)
hold images and XML files describing drawable objects. You’ll learn much more
about what you can do with drawable objects in later chapters.
The values folder holds all your textual content, from string literals to menu
list value arrays to color constants.
Lastly, the layout folders contain XML files to describe how you want your
screens to look.
At compile time, the Android tools take all the folders in your res directory and
place a corresponding ID into an R.java file. This file is automatically re-created and
placed in the project’s gen folder. Consequently, you should never directly change
this R.java file, because any changes are removed the next time you compile. The
IDs in R.java can be passed to everything from XML parsers to text and image views.
When you call setText on a TextView and pass in R.string.hello, the view then
knows to look for that ID in the string file and display what it finds there. When you
set the main view of an activity by calling setContentView and passing in R.layout
.main, the system knows it needs to inflate and create the views found in res/layout/
main.xml and add them to the active views on the screen for the current activity.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 71
Here’s what the R.java ﬁle looks like for a newly created project:

/* AUTO-GENERATED FILE. DO NOT MODIFY.

*
* This class was automatically generated by the
* aapt tool from the resource data it found. It
* should not be modified by hand.
*/
package com.haseman.peachpit;
public final class R {
public static final class attr {
}
public static final class drawable {
public static final int icon=0x7f020000;
}
public static final class layout {
public static final int main=0x7f030000;
}
public static final class string {
public static final int app_name=0x7f040001;
public static final int hello=0x7f040000;
}
}

72 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

When Android compiles your XML files, it renders them to a packed binary
format. The upside of this format is that it loads much faster, so your screens can
snap into focus more quickly. The downside is that you cannot modify any of these
files once they’ve been compiled. So you can’t manipulate your layout and string
files at runtime. You can, however, modify what is rendered to the screen by loading
and changing strings in the Java representation of the views.
Additionally, if you want to reference various resources from other XML files,
you’ll use the @folder/object_id structure. While you may not have been aware
of it, you’ve seen this kind of declaration in action already. Think back to the ini-
tial Hello World layout that the Android tools provide for you. In it, you saw a text
view with the following line: android:text=”@string/hello”. This was Android’s
resource system at work. Instead of specifying R.string.hello, you’ll use the
XML’s @string/hello for XML.
Each type of folder (drawable, layout, values, and several more) has special
naming conventions and tricks you can use to battle the time-consuming problems
of device diversity, language localization, and differing screen resolutions and
densities. Let’s look at what you can do with each type of file.

VALUES FOLDER
The prospect of putting all the constant values for your user interface (strings, colors,
or int/string arrays) in a separate file might sound annoying at first (especially when
you consider that all text manipulators will take a resource ID or a CharSequence).
However, it can cut down many days of work when translating your application
to different languages.
Having all your strings in an external XML file also means that your nontech-
nical colleagues (product managers, designers, or micromanaging bosses) can
manipulate the display text in the screens, menus, and pop-up dialogs without
bothering you. This assumes, of course, that you teach them how to compile and
run the project; feel free to share the first chapter of this book with them.
The values folder can contain:

Strings. All string literals should go into your strings.xml ﬁle.

Arrays. There is a file for the XML-defined arrays, but string arrays can still
go in the strings.xml file if you don’t feel like using a separate file.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 73
Colors. colors.xml can contain any number of declared color constants
for use in everything from text fonts to layout backgrounds. Unless you’re
planning on doing a lot of custom UI drawing, this ﬁle will probably not
be very large.

Dimensions. dimens.xml can contain any number of possible size values

used elsewhere in your layouts. This ﬁle is particularly handy if you wish
to make a view taller or shorter based on the display size of the device your
application is being displayed on. This might seem like a simple thing to do,
but it can be very powerful when combined with the layout folders.

Styles. styles.xml . . . yeah . . . more about this later.

You can create new values folders for each language by using the two-letter
ISO639-2 suffix for a particular language as a suffix to values. You can, for example,
create a values-es folder containing a Spanish version of the strings.xml file.
When a user sets his or her phone to Spanish, Android will check automatically for
an R.string.hello value defined in the strings.xml file within the new values-es
folder. If it finds one, it will display the values-es version rather than the default.
If it doesn’t find a Spanish translation, it will default to the value you defined in
values/strings.xml.
In this way, Android provides you with an easy way to localize all the strings
in your application. It does, however, require you to be vigilant about placing your
string literals in the strings.xml file rather than just calling setText(“Text like
this”); or using android:text=”Text like this” in your XML.

LAYOUT FOLDERS
I’m going to give you three guesses as to what exactly goes into the layout folders.
Typically, it’s where you place either layout XML files for use in setContentView
calls, or sub-layouts that can be included via ViewStubs or inherited views (two
tools that allow you to reuse views in different layouts). Android builds a helpful
mechanic into the layout folders. You can have many folders, with different suf-
fixes, that describe how you want the application to appear under various screen
configurations.

74 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

The simplest example is a layout folder and a layout-land folder. If you place
a firstscreen.xml file in both folders, Android will use the one that most closely
resembles the current screen mode. If you keep the android:id settings consistent,
you will be able to specify two completely different-looking screens within your
XML markups and interact with any of them via your Java code. This technique is
complicated, so let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you create portrait and landscape layouts for the first screen of your
application. Both files are called firstscreen.xml, and the portrait version goes
in the layout folder while the landscape version goes in the layout-land folder.
You could also put the portrait version in a folder called layout-port. In both ver-
sions of firstscreen.xml, you provide all the appropriate IDs for the text views,
buttons, and images.
If your screen had an OK button, you’d provide the portrait and landscape
versions of these buttons the same ID: R.id.ok_button. Remember that you gain
access to views by calling findViewById() and passing in the ID you specified on
the android:id=”@+id/id_goes_here” line. In this case, if you wanted to set a click
listener, you’d fetch the OK button by calling findViewById(R.id.ok_button);
and Android would return the button from your portrait screen if you’re in portrait
mode and the landscape version of the button if you’re in landscape mode. Your
code knows what it must do when that button is pressed, but it doesn’t know about
the dimensions or location of the button. Welcome to the happy land of the Model-
View-Controller (MVC).
MVC is your number one friend when handling the diversity in device screen
sizes. You can lay out your views in any possible configuration and, as long as the
IDs match, you’ll need to write only a single Activity class to handle all possible
screen permutations. You can have specific folders, each with its own set of layout
files for different screen sizes (layout-small to layout-xlarge) and densities (layout-
ldpi to layout-hdpi), and you can mix and match. For example, layout-large-land
would specify layouts for large screens (VGA and WVGA) that are in landscape
mode. For the exact order in which Android defaults through the folders, be sure
to check the Android SDK documentation.
I’m only scratching the surface of the possibilities that these layout folders put
at your disposal. You’ll learn more about this topic in coming chapters on dealing
with display and hardware diversity.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 75
DRAWABLE FOLDERS
For Android, a drawable is simply something that can be drawn to the screen. Android
abstracts away the differences between colors, shapes, and images and allows you to
deal with a superclass that can represent any number of them: Drawable.
You keep the definitions for these objects in the drawable folders.
You should consider using a drawable for two main types of objects:
䊏 Image resources (mostly PNG files)
䊏 XML files describing things you want drawn: shapes, gradients, or colors

The drawable set of folders works similarly to the layout folders. You can specify
any mix of screen densities, layouts, or resolutions, provided you specify them in
the right order.

MANY RESOURCES, ONE APK

Just because you can have a whole different set of images for each screen
size or density doesn’t mean you actually should. Keep a close eye on the
size of your final compiled APK file. If the file grows over a certain size, users
will complain. To combat this bloat, use 9-patches, which are easily scaled
images, and use hand-rendered shapes over large PNG graphics where pos-
sible. While the new marketplace does allow for multiple APKs, it’s a level of
complexity you should avoid.

Referencing a drawable is accomplished in the same way that you reference

values and layouts. For XML files, use the @drawable/resource_name. For example,
in an ImageView (android:src=”@drawable/bridge”), omit the suffix if you’re
referring to XML files or images. Also, keep in mind that Android will always try to
use the drawable folder that is closest to your current configuration. If it can’t find
a good match, it’ll cascade back to what it can find in the default drawable folder.

TIP: Be sure to check the Android SDK documentation

for more info on ordering your suffixes correctly.

76 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT

FIGURE 3.1 A taste of

what’s to come.

Layouts, from the simple to the complex, describe how to arrange a complex series
of views. This section covers the basics of Android’s arsenal of layout classes start-
ing with the ViewGroup, moving through LinearLayouts, and ending with the king
of the Android screen arrangers, the RelativeLayout.

THE VIEWGROUP
Each layout in Android extends what’s known as the ViewGroup. This is the class
of views that by deﬁnition can contain other views as children.
To demonstrate how each of the major layouts function, I’ll be laying out an
example picture-viewer screen. While Android provides its own snazzy photo
viewer, complete with a thumbnail carousel, mine will be simple and an excellent
vehicle for showing you how the various layouts work.
Figure 3.1 shows the screen that we’ll be rendering using the AbsoluteLayout,
the LinearLayout, and the RelativeLayout.

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 77
The example picture viewer has two sections: the button bar with title and
the image itself. The button bar contains Next and Prev buttons and a text view
displaying the name of the image.
Before getting too deep into the layout, there are a few terms to watch for in
the XML:

dip or dp. This is how Android helps you scale your screen layout to
devices with diﬀerent pixel densities. For example, on the Nexus S screen,
1dp = 1.5 pixels. It can be annoying to constantly convert the locations
onscreen to dips, but this small investment in time will pay huge divi-
dends when you’re running on a multitude of Android screens. Example:
android:padding=”20dp”.

px. Use this suffix to define an absolute pixel value for the specified dimen-
sion. In most cases, you should avoid declaring the absolute pixel value and
use dp. Example: android:paddingLeft=”15px”.

match_parent and wrap_content. Before you can draw an Android view to

the screen, it must have a defined width and height. You can define either
of these two values as a constant value (20dp), or you can use one of the two
special height and width values, fill_parent or wrap_content. Each value
does exactly what you’d expect. fill_parent will make the view attempt
to match the dimension of its parent. wrap_content will first request the
measured size of the view and then attempt to set that dimension as the
layout width for the view itself.

With a few simple deﬁnitions out of the way, I can start in on the various layout
classes. I’ll start with one that you’ll ﬁnd appealing but that you should never use
in practice.

THE ABSOLUTELAYOUT
The most important thing you should know about AbsoluteLayouts is that you
should never use them. They are the quintessential beginner’s trap. They appear
to be a good idea at ﬁrst (as they quickly give you exact pixel design), but they can
be frustrating, require excess time laying out new screens, and cause frequent
face-desk interaction. Consult your local Android expert if you experience any of

78 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

these side eﬀects while trying to use an AbsoluteLayout. They’ll likely try to talk
you out of this lunacy.
The AbsoluteLayout , as you might have guessed, allows you to specify
exactly where on the screen you want a particular view to go. Each child of an
AbsoluteLayout should have android:layout_x and android:layout_y values
along with the required width and height settings.
You are probably thinking, “That sounds like a great way to make layouts look
exactly the way I want them to. Why bother learning anything else when I can take
my screen designs and convert them directly into pixel x/y locations?”
I thought the same thing . . . at ﬁrst.
Here’s what the AbsoluteLayout layout XML looks like:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

<AbsoluteLayout
xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/prev”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_x=”0dp”
android:layout_y=”0dp”
android:text=”@string/prev_string”
android:lines=”1”
android:padding=”12dp”
/>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/url_view”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 79
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_x=”110dp”
android:layout_y=”0dp”
android:gravity=”center_horizontal”
android:text=”The Golden Gate”
/>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/next”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”@string/next_string”
android:layout_x=”271dp”
android:layout_y=”0dp”
android:lines=”1”
android:padding=”12dp”
/>
<ImageView
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_x=”0dp”
android:layout_y=”20dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/main_image”
android:src=”@drawable/bridge”
/>
</AbsoluteLayout>

80 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

FIGURE 3.2 AbsoluteLayout (left) seems like a good idea at first . . .

FIGURE 3.3 This isn’t good at all (right).

Nothing in this layout code should look shocking. Each button, text view, and
image view has x and y coordinates. This simple code arranges the views to look
very similar (Figure 3.2) to the original.
All right, Figure 3.2 looks similar to Figure 3.1, but hang on, this is only one of
the 20-something ways that you can consume a single layout. Let’s look at what
happens to this layout when switching to landscape (Figure 3.3).
Yikes, that looks . . . bad! This is no way for a screen to look on any layout. Sure,
you could do an alternative layout for every portrait and landscape screen out there,
but that could add weeks to your schedule, and, worse, every time you need a new
screen aspect you’ll have to start from scratch.
While the AbsoluteLayout can give you a pixel-perfect design, it can achieve that
look for only a single screen conﬁguration. Given that Android has many dozens of
screen sizes and types spread across a huge number of physical devices, layouts like
these will make your life miserable once you move beyond your initial test device.
The only way to make life harder for yourself is to use an AbsoluteLayout with
its children views deﬁned in exact pixels (px) x and y values. Not only will a screen
laid out in this way break when you switch to landscape, but it’ll break when you

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 81
switch from, say, the Nexus S to the HTC Hero, because they each have a different
number of pixels on the screen.
I’ve included the AbsoluteLayout in this chapter because if I didn’t, you might
find it on your own and wonder at what a gem you’d found. This is a cautionary
tale. The other layouts can be frustrating and time consuming up front, but trust
me, they’ll pay off in the end.
Bottom line: Don’t use AbsoluteLayouts except for extremely simple cases. I
could see it used to lay out a small, sophisticated button that could then be dropped
into one of the more dynamic layout classes. . .but please, for your own sanity, don’t
use this layout object unless you absolutely cannot avoid it.

THE LINEARLAYOUT
A LinearLayout is the exact opposite of the AbsoluteLayout. Within it, you’ll
deﬁne a series of views, and the system will size and place them dynamically on
the screen in the order you’ve speciﬁed. This layout is, and I cannot emphasize
this enough, not very good for putting views exactly where you want them. I’m
saving the layout class that is best at this for last.
Here’s how the original picture viewer looks when designed to work with a
LinearLayout:

82 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

<Button
android:id=”@+id/prev”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:paddingLeft=”5dip”
android:paddingRight=”5dip”
android:text=”@string/prev_string”
android:lines=”1”
android:layout_weight=”1”
/>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/url_view”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:gravity=”center_horizontal”
android:layout_weight=”1”
android:text=”The Golden Gate Bridge”
/>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/next”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:paddingLeft=”5dip”
android:paddingRight=”5dip”
android:text=”@string/next_string”
android:lines=”1”
android:layout_weight=”1”/>
</LinearLayout>
<ImageView

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 83
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:gravity=”center_horizontal”
android:id=”@+id/main_image”
android:src=”@drawable/bridge”
/>
</LinearLayout>

Notice that there are two LinearLayouts at work in this example. The top-level
layout contains the second LinearLayout object and the image to be displayed.
The second LinearLayout contains the two buttons and the text of the title. Two
layouts are required, in this case, because any one LinearLayout may have only
one orientation.

DON’T GET IN TOO DEEP

LinearLayouts can only lay out their children in one of two orientations: hori-
zontal or vertical. This can, if you’re not careful, lead to screens with heaping
piles of nested layout objects. Go too deep into a set of nested layouts and
your screen will render at the speed of a herd of turtles. Android engineers
suggest keeping the depth of your layout to less than ten. This is to say, don’t
create a view hierarchy with more than ten nested layouts of any kind. In
practice, do everything you can to use as few layouts as possible, because
you’ll start to see slowdowns on older, slower phones when your layout
depths are greater than seven or eight. If you find you’ve gotten in over
your head with a stack of LinearLayouts, consider refactoring with a single
RelativeLayout instead.

84 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

FIGURE 3.4 The LinearLayout-based screen (left).

FIGURE 3.5 The same layout but in landscape (right).

Figure 3.4 shows what this example XML produces in portrait mode.
This is where Android’s dynamic layouts really start to shine; take a look at
what the exact same layout code looks like when the user shifts into landscape
mode (Figure 3.5).
Not perfect, but a vast improvement over the AbsoluteLayout’s version of the
landscape screen.

USING LINEARLAYOUTS
When using the LinearLayout, the order in which you deﬁne your views is the order
in which they’re placed on the screen. First, take a look at that second LinearLayout:

<LinearLayout
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:orientation=”horizontal”
android:background=”#333333”
android:id=”@+id/button_bar”
>
LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 85
ONE VIEW MUST BE IN CHARGE OF SIZE

One view, or layout, must define a height and width value. You cannot tell
Android that you’d like a layout to wrap its content while, at the same time,
telling a view that it should match its parent. This will cause a compile error
because Android has no idea how big to make either the parent view or the
child layout. Something must define an actual height, even if it’s an image
or a line of text.

By setting the orientation to horizontal, Android knows to place the children

in order from left to right across the top of the screen. The outer layout is a vertical
one, allowing placement of the button bar above the image.
By setting the width to match_parent, I’m making sure the layout itself stretches
all the way across the parent layout (in this case the entire screen). The height is set to
wrap_content, so it will be exactly as tall as the final measured height of its children.
The LinearLayout distributes its children in the order they’re defined. It then
measures all the child views to see how much space they’d like to take up. It will
then divvy up the available space in proportion to the ideal size of its children. If
there is too little space to accommodate all the child views, it’ll give each child a
part of their required space in proportion to their measured size. If there’s more
than enough space for all the child views, it’ll pass out the extra space based on
how large the child’s onMeasure call tells the layout it wants to be. You can modify
this proportional distribution through the layout_weight attribute in each child.
Layout really happens more in the definition of the children than the declara-
tion of the layout itself. So, for a bit of context, let’s take a look at the individual
members of the button bar layout.

86 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

Here is the ﬁrst of the child views in the deﬁnition for the Prev button: FIGURE 3.6 Overly large
buttons thanks to the
<Button LinearLayout.

android:id=”@+id/prev”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:paddingLeft=”5dip”
android:paddingRight=”5dip”
android:text=”@string/prev_string”
android:lines=”1”
android:layout_weight=”1”
/>

The layout_weight value, which can be any decimal number from 0 to 1, tells
the system how much space to give to the child view when the layout has either
too much or too little space.
Take a look at the landscape version of the button bar again (Figure 3.6).

LINEAR LAYOUTS ARE NOT FOR PIXEL PERFECTIONISTS

I’ve said it once and I’ll now say it a second time: LinearLayouts are not great
for laying out pixel-perfect screens. As views get proportionally larger and
smaller, it becomes difficult to get them to rest exactly where you want them
to. Use the LinearLayout when you have a known quantity of objects that
must get on the screen and you’re not overly picky about exactly where they
end up. In small, space-constrained cases, as with small button bars or single
list menu entries, AbsoluteLayouts can prove to be much easier to use to get
exactly the screen layout you’re looking for. This might be the only case I can
think of where an AbsoluteLayout might make sense.

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 87
FIGURE 3.7 Oops, too small!

This may be very close to the way the screen looks in portrait mode, but not
close enough. As the top bar grows, the LinearLayout hands out extra pixel space
in proportion to the measured size of the child view. In this case, because all three
elements (two buttons and the text title) are weighted the same (1), the layout
divides the extra space evenly among them. You can re-weight the buttons such
that they grow in diﬀerent ratios to the text title. Since you want the buttons to
grow at a slower rate than the text, you could try setting their weights to 0. Here
are what the new values look like (with everything else omitted):

Figure 3.7 shows what this change does to the button bar.
Well, technically that’s correct, but it looks awful. You have two options. You
can declare exactly how much extra space you’d like each of the two buttons to
have through the android:padding declaration, or you can give them a little bit
more weight. You can ﬁddle with the ﬁrst option on your own, but let’s take a look
at the padding option together.

88 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

While you don’t want the buttons to get too large, you still need to give them FIGURE 3.8 That’s much
a bit more space than exactly what ﬁts around the text. Let’s try .25 for a weight. better!

I’ve pulled out all non-layout_weight lines for brevity:

FIGURE 3.9 Check back in
<LinearLayout> on portrait mode.

Figure 3.8 shows how that looks in landscape mode.

The result is much more reasonable. But to be sure, check what the bar looks
like in portrait mode. Figure 3.9 shows the result.
Perhaps the Next and Prev buttons could be a little bit larger in portrait mode,
but this result is more than acceptable. They’re not huge, they don’t look crowded,
and they should be big enough even for large fingers to hit.
In the end, nothing beats the LinearLayout s for easily handling different
dynamic screen sizes. Throw as much into one as you please, and it’ll try to accom-
modate everything. There are, however, two major issues to watch out for. First,
because they can orient themselves in only one direction, you may end up needing
a lot of them to handle a complex layout, which can slow drawing performance
significantly. Second, getting a complex screen to render exactly as your designer
wants it to can be an intensive process. For more complex or busy screens and
objects, you’re much better off using a RelativeLayout.

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 89
FIGURE 3.10 Designing the
same screen, except with
the RelativeLayout.

THE RELATIVELAYOUT
The RelativeLayout is the mack daddy of the Android screen layout system. It
allows you to position all your child views in relation to either the parent (the layout
itself) or any other child view within the layout. Let’s take a look at one in action.
Here’s the now familiar image and button arrangement in the photo viewer, but
with a RelativeLayout (Figure 3.10).
There are a few slight measurement diﬀerences between this image and the one
produced with the LinearLayout. This one is also missing the gray background
behind the buttons, which I’ll show you how to add shortly.
Take a look at the XML layout that produced the image in Figure 3.10.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

90 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

<Button
android:id=”@+id/prev”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:padding=”15dip”
android:text=”@string/prev_string”
android:layout_alignParentLeft=”true”
android:layout_alignParentTop=”true”
/>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/next”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:padding=”15dip”
android:text=”@string/next_string”
android:layout_alignParentRight=”true”
android:layout_alignParentTop=”true”
/>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/text_view”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:gravity=”center”
android:layout_toRightOf=”@id/prev”
android:layout_toLeftOf=”@id/next”
android:layout_alignParentTop=”true”
android:layout_centerHorizontal=”true”
android:layout_alignBottom=”@id/prev”

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 91
android:text=”The Golden Gate Bridge”
/>
<ImageView
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_alignParentLeft=”true”
android:layout_alignParentRight=”true”
android:layout_below=”@id/text_view”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/main_image”
android:src=”@drawable/bridge”
/>
</RelativeLayout>

In this layout code, you see the same view components that made up the Linear
Layout except, with the relative version, there’s no need for a second, nested layout.
The mechanics to each member of a RelativeLayout can be more complex than its
linear cousin, so I’ll endeavor to break down all four pieces of this screen one at a time.
The <RelativeLayout> declaration contains only enough information to tell
the layout to ﬁll the entire screen. All information on how to lay out the screen is
found in the child elements. Here’s the ﬁrst one:

92 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

The ﬁrst view, which declares the Prev button, initially declares its ID in the
android:id line. The Prev button needs an ID so you can assign a click listener
to it in the activity code. The layout height and width declarations simply tell the
view to make it large enough to accommodate all the content (in this case, the
“prev” text and a little padding).
The padding declaration tells the system to push the boundaries for the button out
from the smallest required space for the text. In this case, android:padding=”15dip”
tells the system to measure the required space for the “prev” text and then 15 more
device-independent pixels to the outer boundary of the view. As a general rule, it’s
always good to pad your buttons between 10 and 20 dip (depending on screen and
text size). This gives them a little more space to be recognized as buttons, and it
also gives people with large ﬁngers a chance of actually hitting the view.
Now come the parts that tell the system where inside the layout object to
place the button. The attribute android:layout_alignParentLeft=”true” tells
Android to align the left edge of the view with the left edge of the parent’s bound-
ing rectangle. In this case, it’s the left edge of the screen. The android:layout_
alignParentTop=”true” attribute does the same thing except with respect to the
top of the layout object (in this case, the top of the application’s available space).
If you don’t specify any layout parameters, views will default to the upper-left
corner of the layout object. This code example declares these views for explana-
tion purposes.
Now that the Prev button is in place, you’re ready to move on. Here’s the relevant
XML for the Next button:

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 93
The Next button is nearly identical to the Prev button except for the ID (required
to set up a click listener in the activity), the text displaying on the button (“next”),
and the android:layout_alignParentRight=”true” attribute (to lock it to the
right side of the layout object—and thus the right side of the screen—instead of
the left). Here’s the code for the title:

In this text view, things start to get a little more interesting. Again, the ID, height,
and width are things you’ve seen before, but you need to change the title text as
the images change. As the image changes, you’ll need an ID so the activity can
change the name of the picture displayed above it.
android:layout_toRightOf=”@id/prev” tells the layout to align the left edge
of the text view with the right edge of the Prev button. android:layout_toLeftOf=
”@id/next” tells the right edge of the text view to align with the left-most edge of
the Next button. The android:gravity=”center” attribute tells the text to center
itself within any extra available space. This will center it vertically (so it doesn’t
stick to the top of the screen) and horizontally (so it doesn’t stick against the left-
most button).

94 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

This technique of centering a view in the space between two objects is one I use
frequently in my Android work, and it’s a good way to eat up extra space caused
by small and large ﬂuctuations in screen size. That is to say, the text in the center
of the buttons will ﬂoat, centered, within any available screen space you might get
when using a larger screen than the one you’re designing.

ADDING THAT GRAY BACKGROUND

So, you might be asking, the LinearLayout example has a gray background; if the
RelativeLayout is so amazing, why doesn’t it have one as well? First, stop asking
your book questions; you’ll look a little odd in public. Second, I withheld the back-
ground because I wanted to show you how easy it is to add it. I’ve placed the XML
required to add the background in the following code. Take a second to look it over:

LAYOUT MANAGEMENT 95
I want the gray box to be drawn behind the button bar, so I placed it as the ﬁrst
view in the layout. Android draws the view stack in the order they’re declared. So,
were I to incorrectly place the listed XML below the button and text declarations,
you’d see only the gray bar covering over both the text and the buttons.
With that, you’ve successfully added a gray background and brought the Relative
Layout version of this view into parity with the earlier LinearLayout demonstra-
tion. The RelativeLayout can handle more complex displays without requiring
other nested layouts. It also can, if you’re smart about it, handle changes in screen
size, as shown by having the image’s name ﬂoat between the buttons no matter
how far apart they get.

96 CHAPTER 3 CREATING USER INTERFACES

WRAPPING UP

Throughout this chapter, you’ve come to understand the fundamental building

blocks that make up Android’s UI. While I haven’t yet had time to show you any
of these particular classes in much depth, together we’ve laid the groundwork for
more serious chapters to come. In this way I can dive deep into text views (yes, we
will) without worrying that you’ll not know how to arrange them next to an image
or make them respond to click events.
This concludes the overview of displaying information to users. You should be
comfortable building and changing basic user interfaces through Java and Android’s
XML layout system. If you didn’t skip any sections, you’ll also be able to extend
existing built-in views to make Android do exactly your bidding. Next you’ll take
a break from drawing things on screens and look at how to acquire data for your
pretty user interfaces.

WRAPPING UP 97
4
ACQUIRING DATA
While the prime directivee off this chapter is to
to
teach you how to acquire data
ata from a remote source, this
is really just a sneaky way for me to teach you about Android
and the main thread. For the sake of simplicity, all the examples
in this chapter will deal with downloading and rendering image
data. In the next chapter, on adapters and lists, I’ll introduce you
to parsing complex data and displaying it to users. Image data, as
a general rule, is larger and more cumbersome, so you’ll run into
more interesting and demonstrative timing issues in dealing with it.

99
THE MAIN THREAD

The Android operation system has exactly one blessed thread authorized to change
anything that will be seen by the user. This alleviates what could be a concurrency
nightmare, such as view locations and data changing in one thread while a diﬀer-
ent one is trying to lay them out onscreen. If only one thread is allowed to touch
the user interface, Android can guarantee that nothing vital is changed while it’s
measuring views and rendering them to the screen. This has, unfortunately, seri-
ous repercussions for how you’ll need to acquire and process data. Let me start
with a simple example.

YOU THERE, FETCH ME THAT DATA!

Were I to ask you, right now, to download an image and display it to the screen,
you’d probably write code that looks a lot like this:

public void onCreate(Bundle extra){

try{
URL url = new URL(“http://wanderingoak.net/bridge.png”);
HttpURLConnection httpCon =
(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
if(httpCon.getResponseCode() != 200)
throw new Exception(“Failed to connect”);
InputStream is = httpCon.getInputStream();
Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);
ImageView iv = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.main_image);
if(iv!=null)
iv.setImageBitmap(bitmap);
}catch(Exception e){
Log.e(“ImageFetching”,”Didn’t work!”,e);
}
}

100 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

FIGURE 4.1 What the user sees when
you hold the main thread hostage.

This is exactly what I did when initially faced with the same problem. While
this code will fetch and display the required bitmap, there is a very sinister issue
lurking in the code—namely, the code itself is running on the main thread. Why
is this a problem? Consider that there can be only one main thread and that the
main thread is the only one that can interact with the screen in any capacity. This
means that while the example code is waiting for the network to come back with
image data, nothing whatsoever can be rendered to the screen. This image-fetching
code will block any action from taking place anywhere on the device. If you hold
the main thread hostage, buttons will not be processed, phone calls cannot be
answered, and nothing can be drawn to the screen until you release it.

WATCHDOGS
Given that a simple programmer error (like the one in the example code) could
eﬀectively cripple any Android device, Google has gone to great lengths to make
sure no single application can control the main thread for any length of time. Hog-
ging too much of the main thread’s time will result in this disastrous dialog screen
(Figure 4.1) showing up over your application.

THE MAIN THREAD 101

TRACKING DOWN ANR CRASHES

Anytime you see an ANR crash, Android will write a file containing a full
stack trace. You can access this file with the following ADB command line:
adb pull /data/anr/traces.txt. This should help you find the offending line.
The traces.txt file shows the stack trace of every thread in your program. The
first thread in the list is usually the one to look at carefully. Sometimes, the
long-running blocking operation will have completed before the system starts
writing traces.txt, which can make for a bewildering stack trace. Your long-
running operation probably finished just after Android started to get huffy
about the main thread being delayed. In the example code that displays the
image, however, it will probably show that httpCon.getResponseCode() was
the culprit. You’ll know this because it will be listed as the topmost stack trace
under your application’s thread list.

This dialog is unaﬀectionately referred to by developers as an ANR (App Not

Responding) crash. Although operations will continue in the background, and
the user can press the Wait button to return to whatever’s going on within your
application, this is catastrophic for most users, and you should avoid it at all costs.

WHAT NOT TO DO
What kind of things should you avoid on the main thread?
䊏 Anything involving the network
䊏 Any task requiring a read or write from or to the ﬁle system
䊏 Heavy processing of any kind (such as image or movie modiﬁcation)
䊏 Any task blocking a thread while you wait for something to complete

Excluding this list, there isn’t much left, so, as a general rule, if it doesn’t involve
setup or modiﬁcation of the user interface, don’t do it on the main thread.

WHEN AM I ON THE MAIN THREAD?

Anytime a method is called from the system (unless explicitly otherwise stated), you
can be sure you’re on the main thread. Again, as a general rule, if you’re not in a thread
created by you, it’s safe to assume you’re probably on the main one, so be careful.

102 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

GETTING OFF THE MAIN THREAD

You can see why holding the main thread hostage while grabbing a silly picture
of the Golden Gate Bridge is a bad idea. But how, you might be wondering, do I
get oﬀ the main thread? An inventive hacker might simply move all the oﬀending
code into a separate thread. This imaginary hacker might produce code looking
something like this:

public void onCreate(Bundle extra){

new Thread(){
public void run(){
try{
URL url = new URL(“http://wanderingoak.net/bridge.
p png”);
HttpURLConnection httpCon = (HttpURLConnection)
p url.openConnection();
if(httpCon.getResponseCode() != 200)
throw new
Exception(“Failed to connect”);
InputStream is = httpCon.getInputStream();
Bitmap bt = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);
ImageView iv =
(ImageView)findViewById(R.id.remote_image);
iv.setImageBitmap(bt);
}catch(Exception e){
//handle failure here
}
}
}.start();
}

GETTING OFF THE MAIN THREAD 103

“There,” your enterprising hacker friend might say, “I’ve ﬁxed your problem. The
main thread can continue to run unimpeded by the silly PNG downloading code.”
There is, however, another problem with this new code. If you run the method on
your own emulator, you’ll see that it throws an exception and cannot display the
image onscreen.
Why, you might now ask, is this new failure happening? Well, remember that
the main thread is the only one allowed to make changes to the user interface?
Calling setImageBitmap is very much in the realm of one of those changes and,
thus, can be done only while on the main thread.

GETTING BACK TO MAIN LAND

Android provides, through the Activity class, a way to get back on the main thread
as long as you have access to an activity. Let me ﬁx the hacker’s code to do this
correctly. As I don’t want to indent the code into the following page, I’ll continue
this from the line on which the bitmap is created (remember, we’re still inside the
Activity class, within the onCreate method, inside an inline thread declaration)
(why do I hear the music from Inception playing in my head?).
For orientation purposes, I’ll continue this from the line on which the bitmap
was created in the previous code listing. If you’re confused, check the sample code
for this chapter.

final Bitmap bt = BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);

ImageActivity.this.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
ImageView iv = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.remote_image);
iv.setImageBitmap(bt);
}
});
//All the close brackets omitted to save space

104 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

Remember, we’re already running in a thread, so accessing just this will refer
to the thread itself. I, on the other hand, need to invoke a method on the activity.
Calling ImageActivity.this provides a pointer to the outer Activity class in which
we’ve spun up this hacky code and will thus allow us to call runOnUiThread. Further,
because I want to access the recently created bitmap in a diﬀerent thread, I’ll need
to make the bitmap declaration final or the compiler will get cranky with us.
When you call runOnUiThread, Android will schedule this work to be done as
soon as the main thread is free from other tasks. Once back on the main thread,
all the same “don’t be a hog” rules again apply.

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY!

If you’re looking at this jumbled, confusing, un-cancelable code and thinking to
yourself, “Self. There must be a cleaner way to do this,” you’d be right. There are
many ways to handle long-running tasks; I’ll show you what I think are the two
most useful. One is the AsyncTask, a simple way to do an easy action within an
activity. The other, IntentService, is more complicated but much better at handling
repetitive work that can span multiple activities.

GETTING OFF THE MAIN THREAD 105

THE ASYNCTASK

At its core, the AsyncTask is an abstract class that you extend and that provides
the basic framework for a time-consuming asynchronous task.
The best way to describe the AsyncTask is to call it a working thread sand-
wich. That is to say, it has three major methods for which you must provide
implementation.

1. onPreExecute takes place on the main thread and is the ﬁrst slice of bread.
It sets up the task, prepares a loading dialog, and warns the user that some-
thing is about to happen.

2. doInBackground is the meat of this little task sandwich. This method is

guaranteed by Android to run on a separate background thread. This is
where the majority of your work takes place.

3. onPostExecute will be called once your work is ﬁnished (again, on the main
thread), and the results produced by the background method will be passed
to it. This is the other slice of bread.

That’s the gist of the asynchronous task. There are more-complicated factors
that I’ll touch on in just a minute, but this is one of the fundamental building blocks
of the Android platform (given that all hard work must be taken oﬀ the main thread).
Take a look at one in action, then we’ll go over the speciﬁcs of it:

private class ImageDownloader

extends AsyncTask<String, Integer, Bitmap>{
protected void onPreExecute(){
//Setup is done here
}
@Override
protected Bitmap doInBackground(String... params) {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
try{
URL url = new URL(params[0]);

106 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

HttpURLConnection httpCon =
(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
if(httpCon.getResponseCode() != 200)
throw new Exception(“Failed to connect”);
InputStream is = httpCon.getInputStream();
return BitmapFactory.decodeStream(is);
}catch(Exception e){
Log.e(“Image”,”Failed to load image”,e);
}
return null;
}
protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... params){
//Update a progress bar here, or ignore it, it’s up to you
}
protected void onPostExecute(Bitmap img){
ImageView iv = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.remote_image);
if(iv!=null && img!=null){
iv.setImageBitmap(img);
}
}
protected void onCancelled(){
}
}

That, dear readers, is an asynchronous task that will download an image at the
end of any URL and display it for your pleasure (provided you have an image view
onscreen with the ID remote_image). Here is how you’d kick oﬀ such a task from
the onCreate method of your activity.

THE ASYNCTASK 107

public void onCreate(Bundle extras){
super.onCreate(extras);
setContentView(R.layout.image_layout);
id = new ImageDownloader();
id.execute(“http://wanderingoak.net/bridge.png”);
}

Once you call execute on the ImageDownloader, it will download the image,
process it into a bitmap, and display it to the screen. That is, assuming your image_
layout.xml ﬁle contains an ImageView with the ID remote_image.

HOW TO MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU

The AsyncTask requires that you specify three generic type arguments (if you’re
unsure about Java and generics, do a little Googling before you press on) as you
declare your extension of the task.
䊏 The type of parameter that will be passed into the class. In this example
AsyncTask code, I’m passing one string that will be the URL, but I could
pass several of them. The parameters will always be referenced as an array
no matter how many of them you pass in. Notice that I reference the single
URL string as params[0].
䊏 The object passed between the doInBackground method (oﬀ the main
thread) and the onProgressUpdate method (which will be called on the
main thread). It doesn’t matter in the example, because I’m not doing any
progress updates in this demo, but it’d probably be an integer, which would
be either the percentage of completion of the transaction or the number
of bytes transferred.
䊏 The object that will be returned by the doInBackground method to be
handled by the onPostExecute call. In this little example, it’s the bitmap
we set out to download.

108 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

Here’s the line in which all three objects are declared:

private class ImageDownloader extends

AsyncTask<String, Integer, Bitmap>{

In this example, these are the classes that will be passed to your three major
methods.

ONPREEXECUTE
protected void onPreExecute(){
}

onPreExecute is usually when you’ll want to set up a loading dialog or a loading

spinner in the corner of the screen (I’ll discuss dialogs in depth later). Remember,
onPreExecute is called on the main thread, so don’t touch the ﬁle system or net-
work at all in this method.

DOINBACKGROUND
protected Bitmap doInBackground(String... params) {
}

This is your chance to make as many network connections, file system accesses,
or other lengthy operations as you like without holding up the phone. The class of
object passed to this method will be determined by the first generic object in your
AsyncTask’s class declaration. Although I’m using only one parameter in the code
sample, you can actually pass any number of parameters (as long as they derive
from the saved class) and you’ll have them at your fingertips when doInBackground
is called. Once your long-running task has been completed, you’ll need to return
the result at the end of your function. This final value will be passed into another
method called back on the main UI thread.

THE ASYNCTASK 109

BEWARE LOADING DIALOGS

Remember that mobile applications are not like their web or desktop coun-
terparts. Your users will typically be using their phones when they’re away
from a conventional computer. This means, usually, that they’re already wait-
ing for something: a bus, that cup of expensive coffee, their friend to come
back from the bathroom, or a boring meeting to end. It’s very important,
therefore, to keep them from having to wait on anything within your appli-
cation. Waiting for your mobile application to connect while you’re already
waiting for something else can be a frustrating experience. Do what you can
to limit users’ exposure to full-screen loading dialogs. They’re unavoidable
sometimes, but minimize them whenever possible.

SHOWING YOUR PROGRESS

There’s another aspect of the AsyncTask that you should be aware of even though
I haven’t demonstrated it. From within doInBackground, you can send progress
updates to the user interface. doInBackground isn’t on the main thread, so if you’d
like to update a progress bar or change the state of something on the screen, you’ll
have to get back on the main thread to make the change.
Within the AsyncTask, you can do this during the doInBackground method by
calling publishProgress and passing in any number of objects deriving from the
second class in the AsyncTask declaration (in the case of this example, an integer).
Android will then, on the main thread, call your declared onProgressUpdate method
and hand over any classes you passed to publishProgress. Here’s what the method
looks like in the AsyncTask example:

protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... params){

//Update a progress bar here, or ignore it, it’s up to you
}

As always, be careful when doing UI updates, because if the activity isn’t cur-
rently onscreen or has been destroyed, you could run into some trouble.

110 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

ONPOSTEXECUTE
The work has been ﬁnished or, in the example, the image has been downloaded. It’s
time to update the screen with what I’ve acquired. At the end of doInBackground,
if successful, I return a loaded bitmap to the AsyncTask. Now Android will switch
to the main thread and call onPostExecute, passing the class I returned at the end
of doInBackground. Here’s what the code for that method looks like:

protected void onPostExecute(Bitmap img){

ImageView iv = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.remote_image);
if(iv!=null && img!=null){
iv.setImageBitmap(img);
}
}

I take the bitmap downloaded from the website, retrieve the image view into
which it’s going to be loaded, and set it as that view’s bitmap to be rendered. There’s
an error case I haven’t correctly handled here. Take a second to look back at the
original code and see if you can spot it.

A FEW IMPORTANT CAVEATS

Typically, an AsyncTask is started from within an activity. However, you must
remember that activities can have short life spans. Recall that, by default, Android
destroys and re-creates any activity each time you rotate the screen. Android will
also destroy your activity when the user backs out of it. You might reasonably ask,
“If I start an AsyncTask from within an activity and then that activity is destroyed,
what happens?” You guessed it: very bad things. Trying to draw to an activity that’s
already been removed from the screen can cause all manner of havoc (usually in
the form of unhandled exceptions).
It’s a good idea to keep track of any AsyncTasks you’ve started, and when the activ-
ity’s onDestroy method is called, make sure to call cancel on any lingering AsyncTask.
There are a few cases in which the AsyncTask is perfect for the job:
䊏 Downloading small amounts of data speciﬁc to one particular activity
䊏 Loading ﬁles from an external storage drive (usually an SD card)

THE ASYNCTASK 111

Make sure, basically, that the data you’re moving with the AsyncTask pertains
to only one activity, because your task generally shouldn’t span more than one. You
can pass it between activities if the screen has been rotated, but this can be tricky.
There are a few cases when it’s not a good idea to use an AsyncTask:
䊏 Any acquired data that may pertain to more than one activity shouldn’t be
acquired through an AsyncTask. Both an image that might be shown on
more than one screen and a list of messages in a Twitter application, for
example, would have relevance outside a single activity.
䊏 Data to be posted to a web service is also a bad idea to put on an AsyncTask
for the following reason: Users will want to fire off a post (posting a photo,
blog, tweet, or other data) and do something else, rather than waiting for
a progress bar to clear. By using an AsyncTask, you’re forcing them to wait
around for the posting activity to finish.
䊏 Last, be aware that there is some overhead for the system in setting up the
AsyncTask. This is fine if you use a few of them, but it may start to slow
down your main thread if you’re firing off hundreds of them.

You might be curious as to exactly what you should use in these cases. I’m glad
you are, because that’s exactly what I’d like to show you next.

112 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

THE INTENTSERVICE

The IntentService is an excellent way to move large amounts of data around without
relying on any speciﬁc activity or even application. The AsyncTask will always take
over the main thread at least twice (with its pre- and post-execute methods), and it
must be owned by an activity that is able to draw to the screen. The IntentService
has no such restriction. To demonstrate, I’ll show you how to download the same
image, this time from the IntentService rather than the AsyncTask.

DECLARING A SERVICE
Services are, essentially, classes that run in the background with no access to the
screen. In order for the system to ﬁnd your service when required, you’ll need to
declare it in your manifest, like so:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

At a minimum, you’ll need to have this simple declaration. It will then allow
you to (as I showed you earlier with activities) explicitly launch your service. Here’s
the code to do exactly that:

Intent i = new Intent(this, ImageIntentService.class);

i.putExtra(“url”, getIntent().getExtras().getString(“url”));
startService(i);

THE INTENTSERVICE 113

At this point, the system will construct a new instance of your service, call its
onCreate method, and then start firing data at the IntentService’s handleIntent
method. The intent service is specifically constructed to handle large amounts of
work and processing off the main thread. The service’s onCreate method will be
called on the main thread, but subsequent calls to handleIntent are guaranteed
by Android to be on a background thread (and this is where you should put your
long-running code in any case).
Right, enough gabbing. Let me introduce you to the ImageIntentService. The
first thing you’ll need to pay attention to is the constructor:

public class ImageIntentService extends IntentService{

public ImageIntentService() {
super(“ImageIntentService”);
}

Notice that the constructor you must declare has no string as a parameter. The
parent’s constructor that you must call, however, must be passed a string. Eclipse
will make it seem that you must declare a constructor with a string when, in reality,
you must declare it without one. This simple mistake can cause you several hours
of intense face-to-desk debugging.
Once your service exists, and before anything else runs, the system will call
your onCreate method. onCreate is an excellent time to run any housekeeping
chores you’ll need for the rest of the service’s tasks (more on this when I show
you the image downloader).
At last, the service can get down to doing some heavy lifting. Once it has been
constructed and has had its onCreate method called, it will then receive a call to
handleIntent for each time any other activity has called startService.

FETCHING IMAGES
The main difference between fetching images and fetching smaller, manageable
data is that larger data sets (such as images or larger data retrievals) should not be
bundled into a final broadcast intent (another major difference to the AsyncTask).
Also, keep in mind that the service has no direct access to any activity, so it cannot

114 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

ever access the screen on its own. Instead of modifying the screen, the IntentService
will send a broadcast intent alerting all listeners that the image download is complete.
Further, since the service cannot pass the actual image data along with that intent,
you’ll need to save the image to the SD card and include the path to that ﬁle in the
ﬁnal completion broadcast.

THE SETUP
Before you can use the external storage to cache the data, you’ll need to create a
cache folder for your application. A good place to check is when the IntentService’s
onCreate method is called:

public void onCreate(){

super.onCreate();
String tmpLocation =
Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory().getPath()
+ CACHE_FOLDER;
cacheDir = new File(tmpLocation);
if(!cacheDir.exists()){
cacheDir.mkdirs();
}
}

Using Android’s environment, you can determine the correct prefix for the
external file system. Once you know the path to the eventual cache folder, you can
then make sure the directory is in place. Yes, I know I told you to avoid file-system
contact while on the main thread (and onCreate is called on the main thread),
but checking and creating a directory is a small enough task that it should be all
right. I’ll leave this as an open question for you as you read through the rest of this
chapter: Where might be a better place to put this code?

THE INTENTSERVICE 115

A NOTE ON FILE SYSTEMS

Relying on a file-system cache has an interesting twist with Android. On most

phones, the internal storage space (used to install applications) is incredibly
limited. You should not, under any circumstances, store large amounts of data
anywhere on the local file system. Always save it to a location returned from
getExternalStorageDirectory.

When you’re saving files to the SD card, you must also be aware that nearly
all pre-2.3 Android devices can have their SD cards removed (or mounted as a
USB drive on the user’s laptop). This means you’ll need to gracefully handle
the case where the SD card is missing. You’ll also need to be able to forgo the
file-system cache on the fly if you want your application to work correctly
when the external drive is missing. There are a lot of details to be conscious
of while implementing a persistent storage cache, but the benefits (offline
access, faster start-up times, fewer app-halting loading dialogs) make it
more than worth your effort.

THE FETCH
Now that you’ve got a place to save images as you download them, it’s time to
implement the image fetcher. Here’s the handleIntent method:

protected void onHandleIntent(Intent intent) {

String remoteUrl = intent.getExtras().getString(“url”);
String location;
String filename =
remoteUrl.substring(
remoteUrl.lastIndexOf(File.separator)+1);
File tmp = new File(cacheDir.getPath()
+ File.separator +filename);
if(tmp.exists()){
location = tmp.getAbsolutePath();
notifyFinished(location, remoteUrl);

116 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

stopSelf();
return;
}
try{
URL url = new URL(remoteUrl);
HttpURLConnection httpCon =
(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
if(httpCon.getResponseCode() != 200)
throw new Exception(“Failed to connect”);
InputStream is = httpCon.getInputStream();
FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(tmp);
writeStream(is, fos);
fos.flush(); fos.close();
is.close();
location = tmp.getAbsolutePath();
notifyFinished(location, remoteUrl);
}catch(Exception e){
Log.e(“Service”,”Failed!”,e);
}
}

This is a lot of code. Fortunately, most of it is stuﬀ you’ve seen before.

First, you retrieve the URL to be downloaded from the Extras bundle on the
intent. Next, you determine a cache file name by taking the last part of the URL.
Once you know what the file will eventually be called, you can check to see if it’s
already in the cache. If it is, you’re finished, and you can notify the system that the
image is available to load into the UI.
If the file isn’t cached, you’ll need to download it. By now you’ve seen the
HttpUrlConnection code used to download an image at least once, so I won’t bore
you by covering it. Also, if you’ve written any Java code before, you probably know
how to write an input stream to disk.

THE INTENTSERVICE 117

THE CLEANUP
At this point, you’ve created the cache file, retrieved it from the web, and written it
to the aforementioned cache file. It’s time to notify anyone who might be listening
that the image is available. Here’s the contents of the notifyFinished method that
will tell the system both that the image is finished and where to get it.

public static final String TRANSACTION_DONE =

“com.haseman.TRANSACTION_DONE”;
private void notifyFinished(String location, String remoteUrl){
Intent i = new Intent(TRANSACTION_DONE);
i.putExtra(“location”, location);
i.putExtra(“url”, remoteUrl);
ImageIntentService.this.sendBroadcast(i);
}

Anyone listening for the broadcast intent com.haseman.TRANSACTION_DONE will

be notified that an image download has finished. They will be able to pull both
the URL (so they can tell if it was an image it actually requested) and the location
of the cached file.

RENDERING THE DOWNLOAD

In order to interact with the downloading service, there are two steps you’ll need
to take. You’ll need to start the service (with the URL you want it to fetch). Before
it starts, however, you’ll need to register a listener for the result broadcast. You can
see these two steps in the following code:

public void onCreate(Bundle extras){

super.onCreate(extras);
setContentView(R.layout.image_layout);
IntentFilter intentFilter = new IntentFilter();
intentFilter.addAction(ImageIntentService.TRANSACTION_DONE);
registerReceiver(imageReceiver, intentFilter);

118 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

Intent i = new Intent(this, ImageIntentService.class);
i.putExtra(“url”,
getIntent().getExtras().getString(“url”));
startService(i);
pd = ProgressDialog.show(this, “Fetching Image”,
“Go intent service go!”);
}

This code registered a receiver (so you can take action once the download is
ﬁnished), started the service, and, ﬁnally, showed a loading dialog to the user.
Now take a look at what the imageReceiver class looks like:

private BroadcastReceiver imageReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {

@Override
public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
String location = intent.getExtras().getString(“location”);
if(location == null || location.length() ==0){
Toast.makeText(context, “Failed to download image”,
Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}
File imageFile = new File(location);
if(!imageFile.exists()){
pd.dismiss();
Toast.makeText(context,
“Unable to Download file :-(“,
Toast.LENGTH_LONG);
return;
}
Bitmap b = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(location);

THE INTENTSERVICE 119

ImageView iv = (ImageView)findViewById(R.id.remote_image);
iv.setImageBitmap(b);
pd.dismiss();
}
};

This is a custom extension of the BroadcastReceiver class. This is what you’ll

need to declare inside your activity in order to correctly process events from the
IntentService. Right now, there are two problems with this code. See if you can
recognize them.
First, you’ll need to extract the file location from the intent. You do this by
looking for the “location” extra. Once you’ve verified that this is indeed a valid file,
you’ll pass it over to the BitmapFactory, which will create the image for you. This
bitmap can then be passed off to the ImageView for rendering.
Now, to the things done wrong (stop reading if you haven’t found them yet. No
cheating!). First, the code is not checking to see if the intent service is broadcasting
a completion intent for exactly the image originally asked for (keep in mind that
one service can service requests from any number of activities).
Second, the bitmap is loading from the SD card. . .on the main thread! Exactly
one of the things I’ve been warning you NOT to do.

CHECKING YOUR WORK

Android, in later versions of the SDK tools, has provided a way to check if your
application is breaking the rules and running slow tasks on the main thread. You
can, in any activity, call StrictMode.enableDefaults, and this will begin to throw
warnings when the system spots main thread violations. StrictMode has many
diﬀerent conﬁgurations and settings, but enabling the defaults and cleaning up
as many errors as you can will work wonders for the speed of your application.

120 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

THE LOADER

Loader is a new class that comes both in Honeycomb and in the Android
Compatibility library. Sadly, there is not enough space in this chapter to cover
it in detail, but I will say that it’s an excellent tool to explore if you must
do heavy lifting off the main thread repeatedly. It, like AsyncTask, is usually
bound to an activity, but it is much better suited to handle situations where
a single task must be performed many times. It’s great for loading cursors
(with the CursorLoader subclass) and for other tasks, like downloading indi-
vidual list items for a ListView. Check the documentation for how best to use
this new and powerful class.

THE INTENTSERVICE 121

WRAPPING UP

That about covers us on how to load data. Remember, loading from the SD card,
network transactions, and longer processing tasks MUST be performed off the
main thread, or your application, and users, will suffer. You can, as I’ve shown
you in this chapter, use a simple thread, an AsyncTask, or an IntentService to
retrieve and process your data. But remember, too, that any action modifying any
view or object onscreen must be carried out on the main thread (or Android will
throw angry exceptions at you).
Further, keep in mind that these three methods are only a few of many possible
background data fetching patterns. Loaders, Workers, and ThreadPools are all other
alternatives that might suit your application better than the examples I’ve given.
Follow the simple rules I’ve outlined here, and your app will be fast, it will
be responsive to your users, and it will avoid the dreaded App Not Responding
notification of doom. Correct use and avoidance of the main thread is critical to
producing a successful application.
If you’re more interested in building lists out of complex data from remote
sources, the next chapter should give you exactly what you’re looking for. I’ll be
showing you how to render a list of Twitter messages to a menu onscreen.
I’ll leave you with a final challenge: Enable Android’s strict mode and move
the little file accesses I’ve left in this chapter’s sample code off the main thread. It
should be a good way to familiarize yourself with the process before you undertake
it on your own.

122 CHAPTER 4 ACQUIRING DATA

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5
ADAPTERS,
LISTVIEWS,
AND LISTS
Lists, in Android, are onee of
o the most often-
often
n-
used tools to show data to users. From the entry menu
of a game to a dynamic list
st of Facebook statuses or Twitter
messages, lists are everywhere. Android’s system for dealing with
them, while complicated at ﬁrst, becomes much easier once you
begin using it. In this chapter, I’ll run the gamut from simple, static
main-menu lists to the dynamic, remote-data-backed custom list
elements of a Twitter feed. Along the way, I’ll expose you to the
inner workings of one of Android’s most often-used and complex
UI views.

125
TWO PIECES TO EACH LIST

To display lists of ordered data with Android, there are two major components
you’ll need to deal with.

LISTVIEW
First, you’ll need a ListView in which to display your content. This is the view whose
job it is to display the information. It can be added to any screen layout, or you can
use Android’s ListActivity or ListFragment to handle some of the organization
for you. If your screen is primarily designed to show a collection of data to the user
in list form, I highly suggest you use ListActivity and its cousin ListFragment.

ADAPTER
The second major class you’ll need to deal with is the Adapter. This is the object
that will feed the individual views, a little bit at a time, to the ListView. It’s also
responsible for ﬁlling and conﬁguring the individual rows to be populated in the
ListView. There are as many Adapter subclasses as drops of water in the ocean (all
right, perhaps slightly fewer), and they cover the range of data types—from static
string lists (ArrayAdapters) to the more dynamic lists (CursorAdapters). You can
extend your own adapter (which I’ll show you in the second half of this chapter).
For now, let me show you how to create a simple main menu with a ListView.
As always, you can either follow along with the sample code I’ve posted at
Peachpit.com/androiddevelopanddesign or open your IDE and do the tasks I’ve
outlined.

126 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

A MAIN MENU

Main menus can take any number of forms. From games to music apps, they provide
a top-level navigation into the app as a whole.
They are also, as a happy side eﬀect, a great way to introduce you to how lists
work. I’ll be creating an array of strings for the resource manager, feeding it to an
array adapter, and plugging that array adapter into the list view contained by a list
activity. Got all that? There are a lot of moving parts to collect when dealing with
lists, so I’ll take it slowly and step by step.

CREATING THE MENU DATA

A menu must have something to display, so you need to create a list of strings to
be displayed. Remember the chapter where you learned that all displayed string
constants should go into the res/values/strings.xml file? String arrays, coinci-
dentally, go into the same file, but with a slightly different syntax. I’ve added the
following to my res/values/strings.xml file:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

<resources>

<string name=”app_name”>List Example</string>
<string name=”main_menu”>Main Menu</string>
<string-array name=”menu_entries”>
<item>Menu Item One</item>
<item>Menu Item Two</item>
<item>Menu Item Three</item>
</string-array>
</resources>

Instead of deﬁning each constant inside a string tag, this time you’ll declare a
string array with a name, and then each element within it can be deﬁned inside an
item tag. Now that you have data, it’s time to create an activity in which to house it.

A MAIN MENU 127

CREATING A LISTACTIVITY
Now you need a place to display your items. You’ll create an instance of ListActivity
in which to display your recently created list.
Every screen must have an activity, and list screens are no exception. In this
case, Android provides you a helper class that was built speciﬁcally to make list
screens easier. It’s called the ListActivity, and it behaves exactly like an activity
does except that it has a few extra methods to make life easier. If you’re coding
along with the chapter, you’ll need to create a new project. Take the main activity
you’d normally have, and modify it to look like the following listing:

package com.haseman.lists;
import android.app.ListActivity;
import android.os.Bundle;
public class MainMenuActivity extends ListActivity{
public void onCreate(Bundle bundle){
super.onCreate(bundle);
setContentView(R.layout.list_activity);
}
}

This code will not, however, compile at the moment, because I haven’t yet deﬁned
what R.layout.list_activity looks like. Guess what you’re going to do next?

DEFINING A LAYOUT FOR YOUR LISTACTIVITY

You will need to create an XML layout file for your list. Again, this is similar to
other layout tasks you’ve done, with one notable exception: You need to define a
ListView with the special ID android:id/list. This is what tells the system which
list view is the main list view your new ListActivity will interact with. I’ve also
added a TextView to the layout as a large title. My XML file looks like the following:

128 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<LinearLayout
xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”
android:orientation=”vertical”>
<TextView
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”0dp”
android:layout_weight=”1”
android:text=”@string/main_menu”
android:gravity=”center”
android:textSize=”40dp”/>
<ListView
android:id=”@android:id/list”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”0dp”
android:layout_weight=”1”
android:gravity=”center”/>
</LinearLayout>

TIP: Special IDs: You only need to call the android:id/list

ListView if you’re using the built-in convenience methods of
ListActivity. If you’re using a regular activity, you can use any ID you
want. This special ID is what connects the ListActivity to the single
ListView with which it is going to interact.

A MAIN MENU 129

AN OPTIMIZATION TRICK

When you’re depending on a LinearLayout to portion up all available space

for your views, you can save a tiny bit of time by specifying that the dimen-
sion (in the child layout) be 0. This means the system doesn’t have to figure
out the ideal size of the object when it walks through your layout to measure
your views before drawing. This may not help a lot, but if you’ve got a layout
with a lot of views, every little bit counts. As you can see in the previous code
listing, I’ve specified the heights be 0 because the LinearLayout is going to
parcel out all the space between them. You’ll also need to specify a weight
for the view, or it might not work.

This XML layout code should look familiar to you, given what you’ve read in
previous chapters. It’s simply splitting the screen space between the title main
menu and the list of sub-screens. You can also see the special Android list ID that
is needed to tell the ListActivity which view it should interact with.

MAKING A MENU LIST ITEM

Now you’ll create a layout XML file for the individual list element.
You’ll need to declare a separate layout object to define how each element
will look in the list. I’m using a very simple version of the ArrayAdapter, so at
this point, the layout XML file must contain only a single text view. We’ll get into
more-complex menu items later in the chapter.
Next, you’ll need to create a new file, containing a single text view, in the /res/
layout/ folder. Here’s what /res/layout/list_element.xml looks like in my project:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

130 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

You don’t actually need to supply an ID for this text view, because you’ll be ref-
erencing it in its capacity as a layout object (R.layout.list_element, in this case).
Setting the gravity to center tells the view that you want the text to lie in the center
of the extra available space. Setting the padding to 15dp will also give the views
a little bit of extra space, so people with hands like mine can hit the correct one.
Now that I’ve declared what I want the list elements to look like, I can go about
adding them to the ListView itself.

CREATING AND POPULATING THE ARRAYADAPTER

Create and conﬁgure an ArrayAdapter. The ArrayAdapter will communicate your
data to the ListView. It will also inﬂate however many copies of the list_element
layout are needed to keep the ListView full of data. As a last step, here’s what you’ll
need to add to the MainMenuActivity’s onCreate method:

public void onCreate(Bundle bundle){

super.onCreate(bundle);
setContentView(R.layout.list_activity);
ArrayAdapter<CharSequence> adapter =
ArrayAdapter.createFromResource(getApplicationContext(),
R.array.menu_entries, R.layout.list_element);
setListAdapter(adapter);
}

Because the ListView has the special @android:id/list system ID, the List
Activity knows where to ﬁnd the ListView. As a result, you’ll only have to create
the adapter and hand it over to the ListActivity. The ListActivity will make sure
that it’s correctly plugged into the ListView and that everything is drawn correctly.

A MAIN MENU 131

FIGURE 5.1 A very basic
main menu.

To create the ArrayAdapter, I specify the array of strings I defined in the section
“Creating the Menu Data” as well as the list_element layout I created in “Making a
Menu List Item.” Assuming that all your Tab A’s are correctly fitted into your Slot
B’s, the resulting screen will look something like Figure 5.1.
Do a little dance—you’ve now got a functional (albeit very simple) list! Have a
smoke, cup of coffee, sip of wine, or dog treat. Whatever you do to reward yourself
for a job well done, do it now. I’ll be here when you get back.

132 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

REACTING TO CLICK EVENTS
Your code will need to listen for item clicks.
What’s the point of having a menu if you can’t tell when items have been
selected? Right, there isn’t one. Let me show you the ﬁnal piece to my basic list
menu example. Add the following method to your MainMenuActivity.java ﬁle:

@Override
public void onListItemClick(ListView lv,
View clickedView,
int position, long id)
{
super.onListItemClick(lv, clickedView, position, id);
TextView tv = (TextView)clickedView;
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
“List Item “+tv.getText()+” was clicked!”,
Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
}

The ListActivity will call this method (if you’ve deﬁned it) every time an
element in the list view is clicked (or tapped with a ﬁnger). For more-complicated
lists, you may want to use the ID (especially if you are using SQLite as a backing
store). For this simple demo, I’ve just popped up a little dialog showing the text of
the item that was pressed. If you’re implementing your own basic main menu, I
suggest you use the position of the clicked item to start an activity, service, or other
action. You can see an example of this if you look at the associated source code.
That’s the most basic list view I could possibly show you. Now, I’ll take you in
the opposite direction and show you what a custom list backed by a remote data
source looks like.

A MAIN MENU 133

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS

While building a main menu is great and all, there are much more complicated uses
to which you can put the Adapter and ListView combination. In fact, I’m going to
show you an example that gets complicated in two ways. First, the data source is
going to be from a remote URL (a Twitter feed). Second, I’m going to add a second
text view to the list (you could, if you want to, add any number of items to it).

THE 1000-FOOT VIEW

All right, here’s the game plan. First, you’ll need an AsyncTask to retrieve the feed
from Twitter’s API. Once you have the data, you’ll need to parse it into JSON (Java-
Script Object Notation) objects and feed that data into a custom adapter. Last, you’ll
need to create that custom adapter and the speciﬁc ListView layout to hold the two
pieces of text info. With those things in hand, you can create the custom layout object.
In the end, you’ll have a list of Peachpit’s 20 most recent Twitter messages, along
with when they were written. If a message was retweeted, the text will display in
red. This is by no means the most complex list you could build using these tools,
but it is a great way to show you how to make your own complex custom list views.

CREATING THE MAIN LAYOUT VIEW

This step is very similar to the “Deﬁning a Layout for Your ListActivity” section. You’ll
need an XML layout containing a ListView with the android:id/list ID. In this case,
however, because the data isn’t available when the activity launches, you’ll need
the ListView to start out hidden. Here’s what my project’s XML layout looks like:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

<LinearLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/
p res/android”
android:orientation=”vertical”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/loading_text”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”

134 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

android:text=”@string/loading”
android:gravity=”center”/>
<ListView
android:id=”@android:id/list”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”
android:visibility=”gone”/>
</LinearLayout>

CREATING THE LISTACTIVITY

Again, you’re going to need a new ListActivity. Since you’re already good at getting
them started, I’ll just skip to showing you what my onCreate method looks like:

private TwitterAsyncTask twitterFetcher;

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
Adapter adapter = new TwitterJSONAdapter();
setListAdapter(adapter);
twitterFetcher = new TwitterAsyncTask();
twitterFetcher.execute(“https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/
p user_timeline.json?include_entities=false&include_
p rts=false&screen_name=peachpit&count=20”);
}

NOTE: If the Twitter URL in the earlier code listing isn’t working,
I’ve stashed a backup copy of the data at http://wanderingoak.net/
twitter_backup.json. If Twitter changes their API, you can always run
the sample code against that URL.

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS 135

This method call does two things of note. First, it creates a new custom Twitter
JSONAdapter, which I’ll show you how to create in a minute. Second, it creates a
TwitterAsyncTask and fires it off.
You’ll have noticed, if you were watching closely, that I created a private data
member to contain the Twitter-fetching task. You astute readers might be wonder-
ing why I chose to stash it aside that way. The answer is that because this task isn’t
happening on the main thread, I need to be able to cancel it should the user close
down the activity before the task finishes. To do this, the onStop method will need
to be able to call the Twitter-fetching AsyncTask, making it a private data member.

GETTING TWITTER DATA

My ﬁrst task, at least when it comes to doing work, is to load the stream of Twitter
messages. You should, thanks to the previous chapter, be very familiar with the ins
and outs of fetching network data. Thanks to your amazing proﬁciency, I’m going
to hide the code required to do a network call and read it into a string. If you’re
having trouble remembering how to do this, feel free to check out the sample code.
Without further preamble, here’s what my TwitterAsyncTask looks like:

private class TwitterAsyncTask extends

AsyncTask<String, Integer, JSONArray>{
@Override
protected JSONArray doInBackground(String... params) {
String response = getURLContents(params[0]);
try {
return new JSONArray(response);
} catch (JSONException ex) { return null; }
}

136 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

@Override
protected void onPostExecute(JSONArray response){
if(response == null)
return;
try{
((TwitterJSONAdapter)getListAdapter())
.setData(response);
getListView().setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
View loading = findViewById(R.id.loading_text);
if(loading!=null)
loading.setVisibility(View.GONE);
}catch(Exception e){
Log.e(“TwitterFeed”,”Failed to set Adapter”);
}
}
}

HANDLING EXCEPTIONS

It’s always a good idea to print out the cause of any particular exception
when it’s caught. This is, at its core, just Java best practices. If an exception
comes through and you’re not printing it to Android’s LogCat tool, things
can get very confusing, very fast. When beginners have trouble debugging
a problem, it’s often because they’re catching and releasing exceptions that
contain important information.

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS 137

Again, if you’re struggling with how to fetch the data at the end of a URL and
turn that data into a string full of JSON, check the included sample code for the
contents of getTwitterFeed. Here are the general steps for fetching the data:

1. Create a JSON array from the string that was fed back to you in getTwitter
Feed. This will parse the data, which you then return at the end of the
doInBackground method.

2. Once you’re back on the main thread inside the onPostExecute method, it’s
time to pass the JSON array to the custom adapter (which I promise to show
you in just a second). Updating the data will trigger a redraw of the list view.

3. Hide the initial “Loading . . . ” TextView that I deﬁned in the XML layout ﬁle,
and show the list instead.

NOTE: Any changes to the Adapter’s data must take place on the main
thread. Modifying the Adapter data counts as changing the UI, as far as
Android is concerned. As always, all changes to the user interface must
be carried out on the main thread. Keep this is mind as you create
your own adapter, especially if you’re fetching data from the network
off the main thread.

MAKING A CUSTOM ADAPTER

All right, now comes the really interesting part. You need to create a custom Adapter
to feed rows into the ListView.
Custom Adapters have four methods you are required to override, all of which
allow the ListView to acquire information about your data set.
䊏 getCount() returns the number of rows currently in the set of information.

䊏 getItem(int position) returns an object corresponding to a particular

row position.
䊏 getItemId(int position) returns the ID that corresponds to the item at a
speciﬁc position. This is used often with Adapters that focus on Cursors
(Android’s SQLite interfaces).

138 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

䊏 getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) is where
most of the Adapter’s work will take place. The ListView, in making this
call, is essentially asking for the view at position. You must, in this method,
return a correctly conﬁgured view for the data at position. More on exactly
how this works in a minute.

As you can see by the get preﬁx on all the required methods, all that Android
Adapters do is provide row content information to the ListView. The ListView,
it would seem, is one very needy girlfriend (or boyfriend . . . I’m not sure how to
assign gender to Android UI interfaces).
Let me show you the example before I talk about any more theory. Twitter’s
API returns its information in the form of JSON-encoded objects. It doesn’t, at this
point, make sense to translate it to some other data store, so I’ll design my custom
adapter to use a JSONArray object as its data backer. This class is declared as an
inner class deﬁnition in ListActivity.

private class TwitterJSONAdapter extends BaseAdapter {

JSONArray data;
//Must be called on the main thread
private void setData(JSONArray data){
this.data = data;
this.notifyDataSetChanged();
}
@Override
public int getCount() {
if(data==null)
return 0;
else
return data.length();
}

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS 139

@Override
public Object getItem(int position) {
if(data==null)
return null;
try{
JSONObject element = (JSONObject)data.get(position);
return element;
}catch(Exception e){
return null;
}
}
@Override
public long getItemId(int position) {
return position;
}

This code, for the most part, wraps accessors to the JSON object. It handles
getting an item from a position (which in this example is the index into the JSON
array). If no data has been set, then the Adapter simply reports that there’s nothing
to see. The only method in the example that doesn’t override a required function
is the code that changes the data set. It also calls notifyDataSetChanged and, as
a result of this method, must be called on the main thread. My class extends from
BaseAdapter because it contains all the baseline methods that I need to build my
custom adapter.

140 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

BUILDING THE LISTVIEWS
At last you’ve come to the part where you get to build and return the individual
custom list view elements. Here’s the code to do exactly that:

@Override
public View getView(int position, View convertView,
p ViewGroup parent) {
JSONObject node = (JSONObject)getItem(position);
ViewGroup listView = null;
//Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!
if(convertView == null)
listView =
(ViewGroup)getLayoutInflater().inflate
(R.layout.twitter_list_item, null);
else
listView = (ViewGroup)convertView;
try{
boolean retweeted = node.getInt(“retweet_count”) > 0;
TextView tv =
(TextView)listView.findViewById(R.id.text_one);
tv.setText(node.getString(“text”));
if(retweeted)
tv.setTextColor(0xFFFF0000);
else
tv.setTextColor(0xFFFFFFFF);
tv = (TextView)listView.findViewById(R.id.text_two);
tv.setText(node.getString(“created_at”));

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS 141

if(retweeted)
tv.setTextColor(0xFFFF0000);
else
tv.setTextColor(0xFFFFFFFF);
}catch(JSONException e){
Log.e(“TwitterView”,”Failed to set list item”,e);
}
return listView;
}

There are a couple of key points to consider in the getView code listing.
First, you need to figure out if the view can be recycled. If it can, you’ll reset all
the visible values for it; otherwise, you’ll inflate a new row—by using the Layout
Inflater—and configure it (more on how and why this works soon).
Second, you’ll detect, from the JSONObject, if the message has been retweeted
by checking the retweet count. If it has, you’ll set the text color for both text views.
Last, you’ll pull both the text and created_at strings from the JSONObject and
set them as the two text views. You might have noticed that I haven’t shown you
what twitter_list_item.xml looks like. That is the view layout I’m creating (by
calling the inflate method and passing in the layout).

THE CUSTOM LAYOUT VIEW

This layout has just two TextViews in it, with the very original IDs of text_one and
text_two and can be found in res/layout/twitter_list_item:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

<LinearLayout
xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:orientation=”vertical”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”>
<TextView

142 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

FIGURE 5.2 The Twitter feed of
Peachpit Press. Now in color!

android:id=”@+id/text_one”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:padding=”6dp”/>
<TextView
android:id=”@+id/text_two”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:padding=”6dp”/>
</LinearLayout>

With this layout, you now have all the moving pieces you need to download,
parse, and display a Twitter feed. Figure 5.2, at last, is what Peachpit’s Twitter feed
looks like in ListView form.

COMPLEX LIST VIEWS 143

HOW DO THESE OBJECTS
INTERACT?

To understand how the ListView interacts with the Adapter, there are a few con-
straints you must understand. First, lists could scroll on to inﬁnity, at least from
the point of view of the device. Yet, as you might have guessed, the phone has a
limited amount of memory. This means that not every single list item can have its
own entry in the list, because the device would quickly run out of space. Further,
if the ListView had to lay out every single row right up front, it could be bogged
down for an unacceptable amount of time.
What Android does to solve these problems is to recycle list element rows. The
process looks a little bit like this:

1. Android goes through the entire list, asking each row how large it would like
to be (this is so it knows how large to draw the scroll indicator).

2. Once it knows roughly how big the entire ListView will be, it then requests
views for the first screen, plus a buffer (so it won’t have to stop and get more
when the user starts scrolling). Your adapter will have to create, configure,
and return those views as the ListView calls getView over and over again.

3. As the user scrolls down and rows fall oﬀ the top of the list, Android will
return them to you when it calls getView. Eﬀectively, it’s asking you to reuse
a previous view by passing in the convertView object to you.

While recycling list element rows is great for conserving memory and speeding
up long lists, it has some interesting side effects.
䊏 All your list views, in order to take advantage of the built-in recycling, must
always inflate from the same row layout. Android won’t know what type
of list item you’ll want to create; so if you had, for example, three different
row layouts, the system would not know which one to pass back to you, and
you’d have to handle your own pools of unused views.
䊏 Any asynchronous task, such as loading an icon from disk or loading a user’s
profile icon, must check that the ListView hasn’t recycled the view while
it’s been downloading or loading the image data. If the row is still showing
the same data when the task finishes, it’s safe to update the row; otherwise,
it needs to cache or chuck the data.

144 CHAPTER 5 ADAPTERS, LISTVIEWS, AND LISTS

WRAPPING UP

This chapter covered the basics of both simple and custom ListViews and Adapters.
I showed you how to create a simple main menu, and I walked you through a simple
example of building a custom Adapter to handle a more complex ListView. You now
have a grasp of the basics.
Lists are still one of the cornerstones of mobile development. I advise you,
however, to make as few boring, graphically ﬂat lists as you possibly can. While
these examples are great for showing you how to build lists of your own, they are
by no means shining examples of solid interface design. You can, and very much
should, make lists when needed, but dress them up as much as you can without
aﬀecting performance.
If you’re hungering for more, I highly suggest reading through Android’s imple-
mentation of ListActivity.java. Because Android is open source, you can get all
the code that makes up its SDK for free! Head over to http://source.android.com
for more information.
Lastly, I wrote more code for this chapter than I had space to explain here. I recom-
mend checking out the sample code associated with this chapter (at Peachpit.com/
androiddevelopanddesign) to learn more about launching a screen as the result of a
menu click and about how to build a similar main menu screen using a ListFragment.

WRAPPING UP 145
6
THE WAY
OF THE SERVICE
Services are one of the most
mosst important, and
an
nd
often under-utilized, components
mponents
ponents of the Android plat
plat--
form. They are essential for
or accomplishing any task whose
data or relevance can span more than one activity. They are like
activities in that they have a lifecycle (albeit a much simpler one),
but they do not have the activity’s ability to draw to the screen.
In practice, services break down into two major use cases: the
listener and the task. Listeners are services that hang out in the
background, waiting for something to happen that prompts them
to take action. Task services are akin to the photo downloader that
we covered before, so in this chapter I’ll focus on listening services.

147
WHAT IS A SERVICE?

A Service is, at its most basic level, a class with a simple runtime lifecycle and
no access to the screen. You had some contact with the IntentService back in
Chapter 4 when I showed you how to retrieve an image with it, but I now have the
chance to help you really dig into this simple yet powerful component.
Keep in mind that while the service might be important to you, it is not more
important to Android than the smooth running of the overall device. This means
that at any point the system may shut down your service if it determines that it’s
been running too long, that it’s been consuming too many resources, or that it’s the
third Friday of the month and there’s a full moon. There is a way to tell the system
not to kill you oﬀ, and I’ll show what that looks like in just a second.

THE SERVICE LIFECYCLE

A service is, essentially, a singleton. Any component in your application may call
startService with an intent that specifies the service they want to get running. If
the service isn’t running, Android will initialize a new one; otherwise, it will just
notify the existing one that a new start command has been issued. Here’s a brief
rundown of the service’s lifecycle.
䊏 onCreate is called on the main thread when the service is started up. It’s a
good time to initialize any data you’re going to rely on throughout the run
of the service.
䊏 onStartCommand will be called every time an activity (or any other com-
ponent) calls startService. The intent passed into startService will be
handed off to your onStartCommand call.
䊏 onBind is your chance to return, to the caller, an interface object that allows
direct method calls on the service. The binder, however, is optional and only
really needed for a heavy level of communication with your service. This
results in a different method of interaction than calling Context.startService.
Like startService, bindService takes an intent and will start up the service
if it’s not already running. If absolutely none of what I just wrote makes sense,
that’s fine; it’ll make much more sense to you by the end of the chapter.

At this point in the lifecycle, your service is now happily running along. Music
can be played, data can be acquired (remember the main thread!), and record-
ings can be made and crunched for voice commands.

148 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

REMEMBER THE MAIN THREAD!

Just because you’re running in a service doesn’t mean you’re off the main
thread! The service’s onCreate method will be called on the main thread. If you
need to do any heavy lifting, consider using an AsyncTask or a Handler+Looper
pattern, or instead of doing a normal service, use an IntentService to process
heavy data off the main thread. Further, there are certain actions (like record-
ing audio) that you can initiate only from the main thread. It’s 10 a.m., do you
know where your threads are?

KEEPING YOUR SERVICE RUNNING

The startForeground method is your chance to strike a clever deal with Android.
The system agrees that after you call this method and until you call stopForeground,
it will not kill oﬀ your service. In exchange, you must provide an icon and view
to be shown to the user in the top bar by handing it a Notification object. This
contract allows long-running, essential, and intensive services (such as music
playback or photo uploading) to run without fear of extermination. At the same
time, the user is aware of why their phone might be a little sluggish.

SHUT IT DOWN!
At some point, the party will end and it’ll be time to clean up. This can happen
because your service called stopSelf or because another component called
Context.stopService. Here’s the teardown portion of the lifecycle:

䊏 onDestroy is your chance to cancel any running tasks and put away any
resource you’ve taken on (for example, media or network tasks). This is also
your chance to unregister any BroadcastReceivers or ContentObservers
that you’ve set up to watch for new media.

If you were expecting a many-step shutdown process, I’m afraid you’re going
to be disappointed. Because services have no notion of being on top of the screen,
there is no need to pause, resume, or do any of the other complex interactions
that activities must support.

WHAT IS A SERVICE? 149

COMMUNICATION

There are two main ways to communicate with a service: intent broadcasts and
binder interfaces. I’m going to show you examples of both and, along the way, let
you see two practical tasks for a service. There are, in fact, many more ways you
can communicate with your services. But in my experience, these are the two most
useful. As always, check the documentation if neither of these approaches feels
quite right for you.

INTENT-BASED COMMUNICATION
Imagine two workers in different rooms who can only communicate with each other
by email. These emails can contain attachments and other pieces of data. The two
workers must get through their day using only this one method of communication.
As you might imagine, this can be an efficient and functional way to get a multitude
of things done, as long as they don’t have to say too much to each other.
This is, in a sense, exactly what intent-based communication with services
would look like translated to real life. The service is started with an intent; when
it completes its task or something that it’s waiting for occurs, it sends a broadcast
intent alerting anyone listening that a particular task is finished. You saw one
example of this in Chapter 4 when I was downloading images using an intent
service. Let me show you one more.
The following example is one of the best examples of intent-based communication
that I can give you in this printed form. I’ll create all the pieces required for a new ser-
vice that runs, with a notification, in the foreground. I use Android’s ContentProvider
to listen for and acquire the location of new photographs as they are taken. This code
will alert you when any new picture is snapped, regardless of the application used
to do it. What you do with the photograph, I’ll leave to your boundless imagination.

AUTO IMAGE UPLOADING

One of my favorite features of the Google+ Android app is its ability to automati-
cally upload photos in the background. It turns out that with a ContentProvider,
Service, and ContentObserver, you can do this quite easily in your own app. My
sample service will launch, place itself in the foreground, and trigger a broadcast
intent whenever a new photo is taken. You could, in your own code, upload the
image or take any number of other actions. Using this technique would involve
the following general steps.

150 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

1. Declare the service.

2. Get yourself a service.

3. Start the service.

4. Spin up the service.

5. Go to the foreground.

6. Observe when content changes.

Let’s get started.

DECLARING THE SERVICE

You must tell Android where to ﬁnd the service.
Each service, as you know, must be declared in the manifest. You can add an
intent ﬁlter for it to respond to (if you want applications other than your own to
be able to start it). For my example, this isn’t necessary, but it might be something
you need to take advantage of later. Here’s the single line you’ll need to place in
your manifest:

GETTING YOURSELF A SERVICE

Now create the class that extends service.

public class PhotoListenerService extends Service {

@Override
public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
return null;
}
}

Since onBind is a required method for the Service class, it has to be in my class
or it won’t compile. Now that you’ve got a service, let’s look at how to actually start it.

COMMUNICATION 151
STARTING THE SERVICE
Start the service from your activity. When I created the project, I got a default activ-
ity (I named mine, quite originally, ServiceExampleActivity) and a main.xml view.

1. Modify that view to contain Start and Stop buttons, like so:
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/
p apk/res/android”
android:orientation=”vertical”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”match_parent”
>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/start_service”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”start service”
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”/>
<Button
android:id=”@+id/stop_service”
android:layout_width=”wrap_content”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”stop service”
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”/>
</LinearLayout>

The buttons are a simple way to put some clickable text on the screen.

152 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

2. With these in place, you can now write code to start and stop the photo
listening service. Here’s what the updated ServiceExampleActivity now
looks like:
public class ServiceExampleActivity extends Activity
implements OnClickListener{
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
Button btn = (Button)findViewById(R.id.start_service);
btn.setOnClickListener(this);
btn = (Button)findViewById(R.id.stop_service);
btn.setOnClickListener(this);
}
}

Nothing earth-shattering in this listing. I’m retrieving references to the views

once they’ve been built. I set my class to implement the OnClickListener
interface, which allows me to set the activity itself as the click listener for
the two buttons. The above code will not compile until you implement
View.onClick.

3. Implement the onClick method:

@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
Intent serviceIntent = new Intent(getApplicationContext(),
PhotoListenerService.class);
if(v.getId() == R.id.start_service){

COMMUNICATION 153
startService(serviceIntent);
}
else if(v.getId() == R.id.stop_service){
stopService(serviceIntent);
}
}

This, again, is pretty simple. The buttons, when clicked, will call this onClick
method. Depending on the view that actually got the click, I’ll either start or stop
the service.

SPINNING UP THE SERVICE

Right now, if you were to run the code as it stands, you’d press the button, the
service would start, and…nothing whatsoever would happen. Let me show you
how to change that.
I want to be notified by the system every time someone takes a picture with
the device’s camera. To do this, you’ll have to register an observer with Android’s
media ContentProvider. Switching back to the PhotoListenerService.java file,
register for media notifications in the service’s onCreate method:

@Override
public void onCreate(){
super.onCreate();
getContentResolver().
registerContentObserver(
MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI,
true,
observer);
}

To register a content observer, I’ll need to provide a Uniform Resource Identiﬁer

(URI). In this case, I’ll use the constant URI for all photos saved on the external
SD card. This constant is declared in the MediaStore. The second parameter is me

154 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

telling Android that I’d like to know when children of that URI are modified. I set
it to true because I’ll want to know when any of the descendants of the image URI
are modified, added, or deleted. Last, I pass in my observer. This is the object whose
onChange method will be called whenever the ContentProvider is updated. It will
register for media updates, but there’s still one more method you’ll need to define.

GOING TO THE FOREGROUND

Bringing your service into the foreground protects it from being killed by Android
when resources are low.
Implement the onStartCommand method of your service as follows.

public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {

super.onStartCommand(intent, flags, startId);
lastUpdateTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
setForegroundState(true);
return Service.START_STICKY;
}

I’m going to record when the service started (more on why that’s important in
just a second). Last, I return Service.START_STICKY, which tells the system that,
should the service be terminated for memory or performance reasons, I’d like to
have it started back up.
I need to write a function to handle creating a notiﬁcation and moving the
service into the foreground. setForegroundState is my own method that handles
placing the service and removing the service from foreground mode.

private void setForegroundState(boolean enable){

if(enable){
Notification n = new Notification(
R.drawable.icon,
“Service Is uploading all your photos”,
System.currentTimeMillis());
n.contentView = new RemoteViews(

COMMUNICATION 155
“com.haseman.serviceExample”,
R.layout.notification);
Intent clickIntent = new Intent(
getApplicationContext(),
ServiceExampleActivity.class);
n.contentIntent =
PendingIntent.getActivity(
getApplicationContext(), 0, clickIntent , 0);
startForeground(1, n);
}
else{
stopForeground(true);
}
}

Thanks to the wonders of line wrapping, this code is a little tricky to read. Essen-
tially, in order to go into foreground mode, you need at the very least a Notification
object, a RemoteView, and an intent that fires when the user clicks the pull-down
notification. Let me break it down a little more.
Start by creating a Notification object, which requires three things:
䊏 A small icon resource, to be constantly displayed along the top of the noti-
fication bar.
䊏 A string, to be briefly flashed along the top bar when the notification appears.
䊏 The time at which to display the notification (in this case, right now!). This
constructor returns a Notification object to which you can add the rest
of the required objects.

You’ll next see me create a RemoteView for the pull-down notiﬁcation bar and
set it in the code listing as the notiﬁcation’s contentIntent.

156 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

FIGURE 6.1 The notification
pull-down in action!

This is the layout that will be inflated and placed into the notification bar. You
can use only stock Android widgets for these (no custom views), and you’ll want
to keep it very simple. Mine consists of an icon and a text view. It’s simple enough
that you can probably imagine exactly what it looks like, but Figure 6.1 shows
what it looks like in action.
It’s worth noting that you are not actually inflating the view yourself when creat-
ing a RemoteView. You’re specifying a layout and then giving the system instructions
on what to do to it when it is eventually inflated (this is the difference between a
View and a RemoteView). You’ll set this as the notification’s contentView.
Next, you’ll see me create an intent that is to be fired when the user presses on
the notification row seen in Figure 6.1. This is a PendingIntent, which, again, is
really an intent and an instruction about what to do with it when the time comes.
In this case, I want to launch the activity with the Start and Stop buttons. You’ll set
the PendingIntent, as I did, to be the notification’s contentIntent.
With the fully built notification in hand, you can now call startForeground
and hand it the notification.
You’ve now met your half of the contract: You’ve told the user who you are and
why you’re running. The system now will allow you to run uninterrupted until such
time as the user disables the service by pressing the activity’s Stop button. It’s time
to start listening for when the content changes.

COMMUNICATION 157
OBSERVING WHEN CONTENT CHANGES
Now that the service is running and in the foreground, I can show you what an
empty ContentObserver looks like:

ContentObserver observer = new ContentObserver(null) {

public void onChange(boolean self){
}
};

Each time any photo on the phone changes, onChange will be called. It is your
task, at that time, to determine what change actually took place. You should do this
by querying the ContentProvider for images that were created after the lastUpdate
Time. Here’s what that looks like in my sample code:

Cursor cursor = null;

try {
cursor = getContentResolver().query(
MediaStore.Images.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, null,
MediaStore.Images.Media.DATE_TAKEN + “ > “+lastUpdateTime,
null, null);
} finally {
if(cursor!= null)
cursor.close();
}

If this looks similar to a SQL query, it’s meant to. I’m specifying the URI that
I want information about (all images). The next parameter (to which I pass null)
would be my chance to list the speciﬁc columns I want to receive. By passing null,
I’ve asked for all of them. Next is the WHERE clause of the query, where I’m asking for
every photo created after the lastUpdateTime. Since I don’t have any more state-
ments, I’ll leave the next parameter null. Finally, the default sorting of results will

158 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

suﬃce so I can pass null for the last parameter. Theoretically, the cursor should
contain exactly one image. Here’s how I process the cursor coming back from the
ContentProvider:

lastUpdateTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
if(cursor.moveToFirst()){
Intent i = new Intent(ACTION_PHOTO_TAKEN);
int dataIDX = cursor.getColumnIndex(MediaStore.Images.Media.DATA);
i.putExtra(“path”, cursor.getString(dataIDX));
sendBroadcast(i);
}

TIP: Uploading photos: Normally, instead of calling send-

Broadcast, I’d spin up another service (or an AsyncTask) to upload
the photo to my favorite photo-sharing service. These services change so
often that it’s probably not worth spelling out exactly how to accomplish
such a thing for Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, or Imgur. If you want to implement
your own, use the photo-downloading IntentService from Chapter 4 as a
framework and go from there.

Now that I have the cursor, I can set the new lastUpdateTime. This will ensure
that this current picture will not show up in subsequent observer-fired queries.
Instead of starting an upload, I’m just sending an alert that a photo was taken and
where you can find that new file. I then move the cursor to its initial position and
make sure (by checking to see if it returns true) that there is actually a piece of
data to find. Next, I’ll get the column index for the data column. Last, I’ll retrieve
the path from the cursor and add it as an extra to my new intent. Last, I broadcast
the existence of the photo for anyone who might be listening for it.
It’s important to call cursor.close on every cursor you get back from a Content
Provider. Otherwise, the system will throw errors at you for leaking memory.

COMMUNICATION 159
BINDER SERVICE COMMUNICATION
On the very opposite side of the spectrum from intent-based communication is
a service controlled through a binder interface. This allows cross-process com-
munication with any other component that binds itself to your service. More than
one process or component can bind with any service singleton, but they will, of
course, all be accessing the same one.
Binding—and subsequently calling methods directly on the service—requires
a few steps in order to handle the exchange cleanly and eﬃciently.

1. Create the interface with an AIDL ﬁle.

2. Create a service stub to return as the IBinder object.

3. Implement a ServiceConnection in order to make the connection with

the service.

As you can see, this is not to be embarked upon unless you really need tight
integration between your component and the service to which you’d like to bind.
In a later chapter, I’ll show you the ins and outs of media playback and recording.
To do this correctly, you’re going to need the kind of integration that only a service
with a bound interface can provide. So, by way of example, I’m going to build a
background service with an IBinder suitable to play music in the background. For
brevity, I’ll avoid discussing every single method, but I’ll cover a few basic functions
and show you how to establish the connection.

CREATING AN AIDL
The AIDL (Android Interface Definition Language) file is your chance to define the
interface through which your service can talk to the outside world. In my example,
I created the IMusicService.aidl file in the src/com/haseman/serviceExample/
directory. In it, you’ll declare an interface:

160 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

package com.haseman.serviceExample;
interface IMusicService
{
void pause();
void play();
void setDataSource(in long id);
String getSongTitle();
}

More methods will eventually be needed for a fully functional music service,
but for now this will do. When you next compile your project, Android will create
an IMusicService.java file (you can find it in Eclipse under the gen package) con-
taining all the Java code required to marshal the appropriate data across processes.
You might be wondering what that in prefix is doing in front of the parameter
declaration of setDataSource. This is how you tell the service that, in this case, the
service is the roach motel of method calls. The parameter goes in, but it doesn’t
come out (you won’t be modifying or changing it within your service). This allows
Android to marshal the variable across the processes once, but it means that it
doesn’t have to marshal it back out again, saving time and resources.

CREATING ANOTHER SERVICE

You’re so good at creating services that I don’t even need to walk you through doing
it. I’m going to make myself a new service just as I did before. But this time, when
you declare it, put it in a diﬀerent process:

The colon (:) in the process tells the system to preﬁx your current package
name to it; otherwise, you can name the process anything you want. This way, the
system can keep your music service running in the background while, at the same
time, being able to shut down your larger application process, which is very handy
on resource-constrained phones.

COMMUNICATION 161
In the new service, I’ve declared all the same methods I had in the AIDL interface
ﬁle. It currently looks like this:

public class MusicService extends Service{

private void pause(){
}
private void play(){
}
public void setDataSource(long id){
}
public String getSongTitle(){
return null;
}
@Override
public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
return null;
}
}

CREATING THE BINDER AND AIDL STUB

Now that you have an interface and the methods in the service, it’s time to connect
the two. You’ll need to do this using a stub. The stub keeps a weak reference to the
service while also implementing your AIDL interface. It’s also the object you’ll pass
back—instead of null—to the onBind call. You can declare it inside your service
(although you don’t actually have to). Here’s what my stub looks like (complete
with my new onBind call to return it back to the system):

162 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

private final IBinder mBinder = new MusicServiceStub(this);
@Override
public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
return mBinder;
}
static class MusicServiceStub extends IMusicService.Stub {
WeakReference<MusicService> mService;
MusicServiceStub(MusicService service) {
mService = new WeakReference<MusicService>(service);
}
public void pause(){
mService.get().pause();
}
public void play(){
mService.get().play();
}
public void setDataSource(long id){
mService.get().setDataSource(id);
}
public String getSongTitle(){
return mService.get().getSongTitle();
}
}

COMMUNICATION 163
You can see how it extends the IMusicService.Stub class and takes, in its
constructor, a pointer to the outer service that it wraps in a weak reference. You
need to do this because the system may keep a reference to the binder stub long
after the service’s onDestroy method has been called, and you’ll want the garbage
collector to be able clean up your service. For the curious, the weak reference allows
the wrapped class to be deallocated by the garbage collector if the weak reference
is the only remaining pointer to it. Quite handy in this case, assuming Android
actually honors weak references.
You can also see how I’m returning this as the IBinder object when onBind is
called. This MusicServiceStub will be the object that other components use to
communicate with the service.

BINDING AND COMMUNICATING WITH THE SERVICE

You now have all the components you need to communicate, across a process, with
your service. It’s time to establish the connection.
I’ve added two more buttons to my service example activity to bind and unbind
from my new skeleton music service. Here’s what I’ve added to my OnClickListener
to support them:

Intent bindServiceIntent =
new Intent(getApplicationContext(), MusicService.class);
if(v.getId() == R.id.start_binder_service) {
bindService(bindServiceIntent, this, Service.START_NOT_STICKY);
} else if(v.getId() == R.id.stop_binder_service) {
unbindService(this);
}

You can see, in the highlighted code, that I’m binding with the service by giving it
䊏 An intent specifying which service I’d like to connect to.
䊏 A pointer to a ServiceConnection object (which I’ll make my activity
implement).

164 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

䊏 A ﬂag telling the system how I’d like the service started (in this case, not
sticky—you can check the SDK documentation for more information about
this one).

Now, my example code won’t compile until I actually add an implements Service
Connection to my activity’s class declaration and the required methods that it
entails. Here, in all their glory, are my activity’s new required methods.

IMusicService mService;
@Override
public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder service) {
mService = IMusicService.Stub.asInterface(service);
try {
mService.setDataSource(0);
} catch (RemoteException re) { Log.e(“MusicService”, “”,re}
}
@Override
public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
}

This code might look a little strange, but the asInterface call is converting
from the IBinder object to the IMusicService (which I can then make direct calls
on). However, each call to the remote service requires that you catch potential
RemoteExceptions that come up.
That’s really all there is to it. Once you’ve received the onServiceConnected
call and completed the conversion, you can stash that MusicService object for
whenever you need it.
But don’t forget to unbind from it when your onDestroy method gets called.
Creating an AIDL and binding to a service in this way is actually one of the
more complicated ways to communicate with a service. If you’re not going to be
building a long-running service in a separate process, this might not be the perfect
setup for you. Consider checking the SDK documentation for the locally bound
service or messenger patterns.

COMMUNICATION 165
WRAPPING UP

In this chapter, you learned how to use a simple foreground service to notify you
when a photograph is added to Android’s ContentProvider. You learned how to
start it, place it in the foreground with a notification, and then kill it off when the
user no longer wanted it to run. Next, I went from the simple to the complex and
showed you how to communicate directly with a service across process boundaries.
You did this by creating an AIDL interface, implementing a stub, and then using a
ServiceConnection and a bindService call to establish a connection with the service.
The first example was a simple service that does only one thing, while the
second example you stormed through was one of the more complex mechanisms
that Android can provide. If your arms are long enough (and you’re not a Tyran-
nosaurus rex), give yourself a resounding pat on the back.

166 CHAPTER 6 THE WAY OF THE SERVICE

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7
MANY DEVICES,
ONE APPLICATION
Android devices have hundreds
und
dreds of different
differen
nt
hardware configurations, from
om advanced TVs to very basic
phones. Writing an application
cation that runs perfectly across
the whole spectrum can seem like a daunting task. Android, for-
tunately, provides many tools to handle the ecosystem on which
it runs. In this chapter, I’ll show you how to leverage Android’s
layout folder hierarchy system, configure your manifest to ensure
that your application is available only to phones that can run it
correctly, and handle older versions of the Android SDK. Android’s
diversity can be a challenge, but I’ll show you how to use the avail-
able tools to make it a manageable one. This chapter covers the
secrets of the res/ folder; weeding out devices with the manifest;
and accommodating older phones with reflection.

169
UNCOVERING THE SECRETS
OF THE RES/ FOLDER

Earlier, I gave you a basic mapping of what goes where in the res/ folder. In this
section, I’ll show you its more advanced functions. As always, you can either
code this yourself or follow along from the sample code posted at Peachpit.com/
androiddevelopanddesign.

LAYOUT FOLDERS
The layout folders are the source of the first tool at your disposal, and it’s one of
the best. Android will, if configured correctly, pick layout files from a folder that
matches the hardware configuration closest to the one it’s running on. Using this
tool, you can define multiple screen layouts for any number of different hardware
configurations. Let’s start with something simple: landscape mode.
Let’s say you have a simple screen with two buttons. Let’s take a look at the
layout XML that produced the two buttons.

<RelativeLayout>

<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/yes_button”
android:layout_marginLeft=”30dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”30dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_above=”@+id/no_button”
android:text=”@string/yes_button_text”
/>
<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/no_button”

170 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

FIGURE 7.1 A simple screen with
two buttons.

FIGURE 7.2 The buttons are far

too large in landscape mode.

android:layout_marginLeft=”30dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”30dp”
android:layout_marginBottom=”60dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”@string/no_button_text”
android:layout_alignParentBottom=”true”
/>

What you see in this code listing shouldn’t be anything new, given your expe-
rience with the RelativeLayout in previous chapters. I’ve declared two buttons,
pinned the No button to the bottom, and aligned the Yes button above it. When
shown in portrait mode, these buttons look simple but pretty good (Figure 7.1).
While this will only win me a design award if the judges are partially blind, it’s
a fairly good-looking, simple, and functional screen. But take a look at what hap-
pens when I switch it to landscape mode (Figure 7.2).

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE RES/ FOLDER 171

This is, for lack of a better term, a disaster. The buttons are far too wide in pro-
portion to both their text and the “Do You Like Chocolate?” question above them.
This is exactly the sort of problem that Android’s layout folders make easy to solve.
In order to the fix this graphical mess, I need the buttons to be side by side
in landscape mode while still being stacked in portrait mode. There are two
approaches to fixing this problem: a slightly heavy-handed method involving set-
ting up a second screen layout for landscape, or using a scalpel to excise and fix
only the parts that are broken. Both solutions have their place.

USING DIFFERENT FOLDERS

Android allows you to specify diﬀerent layout folders for various hardware screen
conﬁgurations. This example solves the problem by adding a layout-land folder
to your project.
Now we come to the magic part.

1. Create a new folder named layout-land for the landscape conﬁguration,

and place it in project/res/.

2. Into this folder, place landscape-speciﬁc layout ﬁles that Android will use
automatically when the device is in landscape mode.

USING <INCLUDE> FOR SMALL CHANGES

The <include> tag is a fantastic way to pull out small portions of your screen
that you’d like to tweak and lay out separately. This is the scalpel method. You cut
out only the portions you want to render differently, you split them into folder-
separated layouts, and you’re finished. Which, in this case, is a perfect way to excise
the buttons and have them render differently depending on the screen orientation.
Here’s how to do exactly that.

1. Create a new button_layout.xml ﬁle in res/layout-land/.

This is the ﬁle into which we’ll put the landscape-speciﬁc layout.

2. Add a LinearLayout and two Buttons in the new button_layout.xml ﬁle,

and place them next to each other in the new horizontal linear layout. Here’s
the ﬁnal contents of my /layout-land/button_layout.xml.

172 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<LinearLayout
xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:orientation=”horizontal”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:layout_marginBottom=”60dp”
android:layout_alignParentBottom=”true”
>
<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/yes_button”
android:layout_marginLeft=”20dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”5dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”@string/yes_button_text”
android:layout_weight=”50”
/>
<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/no_button”
android:layout_marginLeft=”5dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”20dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE RES/ FOLDER 173

android:text=”@string/no_button_text”
android:layout_weight=”50”
/>
</LinearLayout>

As you can see, I’ve created a horizontal layout with two buttons to be used
in landscape mode.

Don’t forget about the portrait layout. If we’re going to include a layout, it’s got
to exist for both the landscape conﬁguration and the default conﬁguration.

3. Create a new button_layout.xml ﬁle in /res/layout/ (or you could add

it as /res/layout-port/button_layout.xml). I’ve just copied the original
buttons’ code and pasted it into a new RelativeLayout:
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<RelativeLayout
xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”
android:layout_marginBottom=”60dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”100dp”
android:layout_alignParentBottom=”true”
>
<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/yes_button”
android:layout_marginLeft=”30dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”30dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”

174 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

android:layout_above=”@+id/no_button”
android:text=”@string/yes_button_text”
/>
<Button
android:padding=”15dp”
android:gravity=”center”
android:id=”@+id/no_button”
android:layout_marginLeft=”30dp”
android:layout_marginRight=”30dp”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”wrap_content”
android:text=”@string/no_button_text”
android:layout_alignParentBottom=”true”
/>
</RelativeLayout>

At this point, you’ve created two layouts: one for portrait and one for
landscape.

4. You can now modify your original XML with an include, like so:
<RelativeLayout>

<include layout=”@layout/button_layout”
android:id=”@+id/button_holder”
/>
</RelativeLayout>

With the <include> tag in place (instead of a single button definition), Android
will grab the button_layout.xml file that corresponds to the screen configura-
tion. If it can’t find one, it will default back to what’s in /res/layout.

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE RES/ FOLDER 175

FIGURE 7.3 No awards for
design, but much better.

Now, with this new code, the landscape mode looks much better (Figure 7.3).
Are there things that could be improved? Sure! Now, however, you know how
to specify that parts of your user interface should change as the screen’s hardware
conﬁguration changes.

MERGING

You don’t have to wrap your excised views in a new ViewGroup (RelativeLayout
in the previous example) for them to be included (as I did here). If you don’t
want to add another layout to the mix but would like to bring in a series of
views from other XML files, simply wrap them in a <merge> tag.

This will allow you to include views without adding another layout to your
view hierarchy.

176 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

WHAT CAN YOU DO BEYOND LANDSCAPE?
Lots. You can add suﬃxes to layout folders to account for just about everything.
Here are a few I use on a regular basis.
䊏 layout-small, layout-normal, layout-large, layout-xlarge

The size modifier accounts for the physical size of the screen. Devices that
would use the small layout folder are typically very old, or very strange
pieces of hardware, at least until Android powered watches become popular.
Most modern phones fit the layout-normal category, while many tablets
are considered xlarge. Google keeps a great breakdown of all the various
screen configurations at http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/
screens.html.
䊏 layout-ldpi, layout-mdpi, layout-hdpi, layout-xhdpi

The dpi, or dots per inch, of the device is a measurement of screen density.
Screens with high densities (240 dpi) would pull from the layout folder
layout-hdpi.

䊏 layout-large-hdpi-land

You can also mix and match the suffixes. This suffix would be used for
phones that have large screens and high resolution and that are in land-
scape mode. Get creative, but remember that just because you can get very
specific about screen configurations, it doesn’t mean you should.

THE FULL SCREEN DEFINE

Just as you can place separate layout files to be referenced in <include> for differ-
ent hardware configurations, so can you define a completely different screen in
the layout-land folder for the system to use in landscape mode. This might seem
like the best course of action at first, but it is less than ideal for several reasons.
䊏 It involves a lot of typing.

Instead of deﬁning two small parts that change based on the screen con-
ﬁguration, you have to make and test more than one entire screen layout.

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE RES/ FOLDER 177

䊏 Making changes can be painful.

With many hardware conﬁgurations comes a plethora of diﬀerent screens.

Were you to fully lay out a screen for every configuration, you’d have a
nightmare on your hands when your designer wants to remove or add a
button. You would have to add it separately to each XML file for every single
screen configuration.

Those two things aside, sometimes you really do need a completely separate
layout for a different hardware or screen configuration. Try to modify small parts
when you can, but don’t be afraid to crack your knuckles and make a totally new
screen layout when it’s necessary.
To make a new layout of the “chocolate” example, you can simply make a second
two_buttons.xml file in /res/layout-land and configure the screen in any way
you like. Then the call to setContentView in the onCreate method of your activity
will, like include, find the right resource for the right screen configuration.

HOW CAN THIS POSSIBLY WORK?

That’s a great question that I’m glad you asked only at the end of the section. Because
it separates layout files from activities, Android can have any number of different
layouts for the myriad of possible screen configurations. You simply specify the
layout name, and Android goes off in search of the correct XML file to show the
user. To keep this process running smoothly, keep the following things in mind:
䊏 The layouts must share the same name.

Android can only find the layout XML by name. As long as the layout files
have the exact same filename, it will locate the version in your landscape
(or any other) folder.
䊏 Make sure that the IDs for your individual views are consistent.

Remember that your activity calls findViewById in order to manipulate and

interact with onscreen objects. The activity shouldn’t care where a view
is to register a click listener, set an image, or pull data from an EditText.

178 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

䊏 Try not to move views around in your activity’s Java code.

Your activity shouldn’t try to change the position of things onscreen. While
in portrait mode, the button might be at point (330, 120); it will be some-
where totally diﬀerent in landscape mode. In this situation, adding more
screen layouts will require also adding the corresponding movement code
to your activity, and this can become time consuming.

BE CAREFUL
Debugging layout issues across many linked layout ﬁles can be exhausting (I’ve
done it), so keep your layouts as stretchy and dynamic as you possibly can. If your
designs are done well, they should be able to automatically handle many screen
resolutions with good use of linear and relative layouts. Fall back on includes and
multiple layout folders only when dynamic layouts can’t do the job. There will be
times, however, when one layout doesn’t do all screens justice. When this happens,
make your breakouts as small and eﬃcient as possible. Don’t hesitate to use this
amazing layout tool, but be careful not to use it too much.

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF THE RES/ FOLDER 179

LIMITING ACCESS TO YOUR
APP TO DEVICES THAT WORK

Your Android application may, in a lot of cases, require some very speciﬁc hard-
ware in order to work correctly. I imagine that users who, for example, download a
camera app to a device that doesn’t have a camera will have a very poor experience.

THE <USES> TAG

Android gives you an avenue to tell the marketplace which devices it should allow
to download and purchase your application. This is done with the <uses> tag in
your AndroidManifest.xml ﬁle.
If, for example, your app requires the device to have a camera, you should add
the following line to your manifest:

<uses-feature android:name=”android.hardware.camera”
android:required=”true”/>

This line tells Android that the application should not be installed on a device
without a camera, because it’s required for correct operation. You can, on the ﬂip
side, declare that your app use a particular piece of hardware, but degrade appro-
priately if it’s not there. An image-editing app might want the camera, but if the
camera’s not there it may still function by modifying images saved from the web
in the device’s built-in gallery. You tell the system this by declaring the hardware
as used but setting the requirement to false:

<uses-feature android:name=”android.hardware.camera”
android:required=”false”/>

There are a host of hardware features you can set. It’s probably best to check
the documentation for the full list (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/
manifest/uses-feature-element.html).

180 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

SDK VERSION NUMBER
You can also declare which versions of the SDK your application supports. You do this
by declaring <uses-sdk> in your manifest. In fact, if you created your project using
Eclipse or the Android command-line tools, you already have a basic declaration:

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion=”10” />

You can add minimum and maximum supported SDKs if there are classes or
objects you rely on that aren’t available on older devices. You can, however, block
out older and newer versions of the SDK with a declaration that looks like this:

<uses-sdk
android:maxSdkVersion=”10”
android:minSdkVersion=”6” />

This will tell the Android Market to list the associated application for devices
that are SDK 6: Android 2.0.1 update 1 and above. It will also block devices greater
than Gingerbread from running your software. Further, if you try to load the app
through a web link, the downloader will block the install on the grounds that the
application isn’t supported.
It’s worth mentioning that this sort of heavy-handed blocking should really
be a last-ditch eﬀort. If you can make your application work well with both the
latest and oldest devices, you should. With this declaration, you can limit who is
allowed to install your app.

LIMITING ACCESS TO YOUR APP TO DEVICES THAT WORK 181

HANDLING CODE IN OLDER
ANDROID VERSIONS

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found the perfect Android SDK class to solve
some annoying problem, only to find out that its use is limited to the latest version
of the SDK. There is one trick you can use when faced with code that will compile
only on later versions of Android: reflection.
While reflection is in no way unique to Android (it’s built into Java), it is some-
thing you can use to protect older phones from newfangled classes and methods.

SHAREDPREFERENCES AND APPLY

Long ago, in a galaxy that’s actually quite close, Google ﬁgured out that writing to
disk on the main thread is a bad thing for performance. During this discovery, they
found that the SharedPreferences (something that’s typically used to save user
settings and preferences) do actually write to disk when you save them through
their commit method. You’ll see what I’m talking about in the following method,
which saves a username to the preferences:

public void setUsername(String username){

SharedPreferences prefs =
PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(this);
Editor ed = prefs.edit();
ed.putString(“username”, username);
ed.commit();
}

This works just ﬁne, but as it turns out, commit writes to the disk, and calling
this on the main thread is a no-no (for reasons we’ve discussed at length). In SDK
version 9, however, Google introduced the apply method to the SharedPreferences
Editor class. Again, this is great, but there’s a catch: Any device that tries to use a
class containing the apply method will throw a validation exception and crash. So
how, you might be wondering, do I use apply on Android SDK 9 (2.3.3) and higher
without breaking any 2.2 (or earlier) devices?

182 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

REFLECTING YOUR TROUBLES AWAY
The solution for this problem, and indeed all problems with later declared SDK
methods, is to access them using reflection. Reflection allows you to use Java meth-
ods without explicitly defining or including them in your code. It’s perfect for
handling these kinds of situations.
Ideally, I’d like to call apply if it’s available (SDK 9 and higher) but fall back to
commit if apply is going to cause problems. Here’s the new version of setUsername
to do exactly that:

public void setUsername(String username){

SharedPreferences prefs =
PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(this);
Editor ed = prefs.edit();
ed.putString(“username”, username);
try{
Method applyMethod =
Editor.class.getDeclaredMethod(“apply”,
new Class[]{});
if(applyMethod != null)
applyMethod.invoke(ed, new Object[]{});
else
ed.commit();
}catch(Exception error){
ed.commit();
}
}

While this method starts the same as the previous one—getting the Editor and
using it to save the string—it diverges when it comes time to save that username.

HANDLING CODE IN OLDER ANDROID VERSIONS 183

Reflection can throw several different errors (the major one to look out for is
MethodNotFoundException), so the reflection calls will need to be wrapped in a try
catch block. I’m first requesting the apply method from the Editor class. If I get
it (and it isn’t null, it doesn’t throw an exception, and the lunar phase is exactly
right), I’ll then be able to invoke it (again through the reflection call) and we’re
done. If it isn’t found as part of the SharedPreferences Editor class, I’ll fall back
on calling commit. Reflection allows me to define and use methods that may not
be compiled into earlier versions of the SDK.

ALWAYS KEEP AN EYE ON API LEVELS

In the Android documentation, each class and method has a small gray label read-
ing “Since: API Level #” on the right-hand side. If that number is higher than the
system you’d like to support, you may need to re-evaluate using that class or method.
Reflection allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can use these lat-
est methods on newer devices that support them, while gracefully degrading on
devices that don’t.
Keep in mind, however, that reflection is slow and potentially error prone,
so use it sparingly and with care. If you’re going to be frequently using a class or
method that has two different implementations (Contacts, for example), consider
using conditional class loading instead. That is, write two Adapter classes for each
version of the class (one for the old, one for the new), and use whichever one is
supported. You can always find out which SDK your device is running by checking
android.os.Build.Version.SDK.

184 CHAPTER 7 MANY DEVICES, ONE APPLICATION

WRAPPING UP

In this chapter, you learned how to handle diversity in screen resolution, density,
and configuration. You did this through advanced use of the layout folders, the
<include> tag, and Android’s XML layout system. Then you learned how to tell
Android which device features you require by putting declarations in the manifest.
Last, you learned about using reflection to take advantage of advanced methods
when they’re available and to avoid them when they’re not.
Given all these tools, you should be ready to bring your killer mobile application
into play on the tremendous number of devices—from refrigerators to phones to
televisions—available to you on the Android platform.
In any case, monotony is boring. Different devices allow for innovation, greater
user choice, and funny-looking screen protectors. Now that you’re equipped to
handle it, you’ll be scaling resources and rocking the landscape mode with ease.

WRAPPING UP 185
8
MOVIES AND MUSIC
Support for media, both audio
aud
dio and visual, will
wiill
hopefully be an essential
al part of your next immersive
Android application. Both
h industries are ripe for reinven-
tion, and the next media format revolution almost certainly will
involve mobile devices. To this end, I’ll get you started with the
basics for Android’s video and music libraries in this chapter. I’ll
also point out a few things you’ll need to be aware of as you build
a background media playback service: movies, music playback,
background service, and what to watch out for.

187
MOVIES

Movie playback on an Android device boils down to the VideoView class. In this
section, I’ll use a simple example application that will play through every video
saved on a phone’s SD card. Here is the general process:
䊏 I’ll use the ContentProvider (something you’ll remember from our brief
discussion in Chapter 6 when we uploaded the most recent photo) to request
every video saved to the user’s external card.
䊏 After loading a Cursor (Android’s query result data object) with all the
device’s videos, I’ll need a method to play the next one.
䊏 I’ll set up an activity as a listener so that when video playback is complete, I can
call my playNextVideo method and move on to the next video in the cursor.
䊏 Last, I’ll clean up after my cursor when the user leaves the playback screen.

Before I can do any of these things, however, I need to place a VideoView on

my main layout to work with.

ADDING A VIDEOVIEW
Placing a VideoView onscreen is as simple as adding it to your XML layout. Here’s
what my main.xml ﬁle now looks like:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

188 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

Once the video view is in the screen’s layout, you can retrieve it, as you would
any other view, with findViewById. I’m going to need access to the video view later
when it’s time to switch videos. Instead of retrieving the view with findViewById
each time, I’ll add a private data member to my Activity class. Next, I’ll need to
conﬁgure the video player.

SETTING UP FOR THE VIDEOVIEW

In the following code listing, I’m doing many normal onCreate sorts of things.

VideoView videoView = null;

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
videoView = (VideoView)findViewById(R.id.my_video_view);
videoView.setOnCompletionListener(this);
}

Here I’m setting the content view, retrieving and caching the video view with
findViewById, and setting my activity as the video view’s onCompletionListener.
In order for the activity to pass itself into the VideoView as the onCompletion
Listener , I have to extend OnCompletionListener and implement my own
onCompletion method. Here is what I’ve added to my activity:

public class MediaExampleActivity extends Activity

implements OnCompletionListener{
@Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
}
//Rest of Activity code omitted
}

MOVIES 189
I now have a conﬁgured, yet very simplistic, video player. You’ll most likely want
to have visual onscreen controls. Android’s VideoView allows you to implement and
set up a MediaController for the VideoView class. If you’re looking to go further
into video playback after this chapter, this would be an excellent place to start.

GETTING MEDIA TO PLAY

Now that my video view is ready to roll, I can start hunting for things for it to actu-
ally play. For this simple example, I’m going to play every video on the device one
after another until they’re all ﬁnished. To achieve this, I’ll use Android’s media
ContentProvider (accessed with a call to getContentResolver). I’ll show you the
code and then dig into some speciﬁcs. Here’s what onCreate looks like with the
new code to fetch a cursor with all the media objects:

Cursor mediaCursor = null;

VideoView videoView = null;
int dataIdx = 0;
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
videoView = (VideoView)findViewById(R.id.my_video_view);
videoView.setOnCompletionListener(this);
String projection[] = new String[] {Video.Media.DATA};
mediaCursor =
getContentResolver().query(
Video.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI,
projection, null, null, null);
if(mediaCursor != null && mediaCursor.getCount() > 0){
dataIdx = mediaCursor.getColumnIndex(Video.Media.DATA);
playNextVideo();
}
}

190 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

ANDROID, MEDIA, AND THE CONTENTRESOLVER

Android will, under certain conditions, search your SD card for new media
by using a helper called the MediaScanner. When new media is found, it’s
added to Android’s media ContentProvider. Using the columns defined in the
MediaStore class, you can query the phone’s built-in media library for con-
tent. The MediaScanner will read ID3 tags and any other metadata it can to
acquire information about the device’s content. Although this example and
the photo lookup example from the previous chapter are pretty simple, the
media store and Android’s ContentResolver can be powerful if used correctly.
Check the SDK documentation for these classes to get more information.

As you can see, I’m still fetching and caching the video view, but now I’m issu-
ing a query to Android’s ContentProvider for the DATA column of all media rows
that are videos. Specifically, you can see this in action in the highlighted code. That
query is fairly simple in that I want all videos on the external drive (SD card), and I
only care about the data column for all those rows. This column for any particular
row should always contain the path to the actual media content on disk. It’s this
path that I’ll eventually hand off to the VideoView for playback.
Note that it is possible to pass URIs to the video view. The video playback
mechanism will find the path to the object for you. I would, however, like to show
you the harder way so that you’ll be more informed. And if you later need to upload
or manipulate a file directly, you’ll know how to acquire it.
The Cursor object (a class Android uses to wrap database query responses) can
be null if the external media card is removed (or mounted into USB storage mode),
so I’ll need to check for a null cursor or one with no results before moving on.
Typically in this case, I’d display a message to the user about their SD card being
unavailable, but I’ll leave that task up to your imagination.
Last, I’ll get and cache the column index for the data row. This will make it easier
for my playNextVideo method to interact with the cursor’s results.

MOVIES 191
LOADING AND PLAYING MEDIA
At this point, you have a video view, a cursor full of media to play, and a listener
configured to tell you when media playback is finished. Let’s put the final piece
into the game, the code in playNextVideo:

private void playNextVideo(){

mediaCursor.moveToNext();
if(mediaCursor.isAfterLast()){
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
“End of Line.”, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
}
else{
String path = mediaCursor.getString(dataIdx);
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
“Playing: “+path, Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
videoView.setVideoPath(path);
videoView.start();
}
}

My first task is to move the cursor to the next piece of media and make sure we
haven’t run out of stuff to play. When I know I’ve got a valid row from the cursor,
I can tell the video view what it should render next. Video views can accept both
a path defined as a string as well as the URI for a piece of media declared in the
content provider. As I mentioned earlier, the data column of the cursor contains
the file path to the media itself. I’ll pull this out of the Cursor, hand it off to the
video view, and then start playback.

TIP: You’re not limited to just file paths—you can hand the
video view a URL, and it will query and play the media found there.

192 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

Recall that earlier I registered my activity as the OnCompletionListener for the
video view so that when a video is ﬁnished it will notify me via the OnCompletion call.
In that method, I just need to call back into my playNextVideo code and we’re playing!

@Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
playNextVideo();
}

At this point, the pieces are in place, videos play, and you’re almost done!

CLEANUP
You’ve seen me do this at least once before, but it’s always important to close any
cursors you request from the content provider. In past cases, I’ve requested data
with a query, pulled out the relevant information, and immediately closed the
cursor. In this case, however, I need to keep the cursor around for when the video
change has to occur. This does not get me oﬀ the hook; I still need to close it down,
so I’ll need to add that code to my activity’s onDestroy method:

@Override
public void onDestroy(){
if(mediaCursor!=null){
mediaCursor.close();
}
}

MOVIES 193
THE REST, AS THEY SAY, IS UP TO YOU
I’ve shown you the very basics of loading and playing video content. Now it’s time for
you to explore it on your own. Think about loading a video from a remote location
(hint: encoding a URL as a URI) or building a progress bar (hint: getCurrentProgress
calls on the VideoView).
Because errors are to media playback as swearing is to sailors, registering for
an onErrorListener is never a bad idea. Android will, if you pass it a class that
implements the OnErrorListener interface, tell you if it has hiccups playing your
media ﬁles. As always, check the documentation for more information on playback.

194 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

MUSIC

Music playback, in general, revolves around the MediaPlayer class. This is in a

sense very similar to what you’ve just done with the video view (except you don’t
need a View object to render into).
Media players, if used to play music, should end up in their own services, with
one notable exception: games and application sound eﬀects. Building a sound eﬀect
example will make for a very simple way to get into the basics of audio playback.

MEDIAPLAYER AND STATE

You do not simply walk into Mordor. Similarly, you do not simply run about playing
things willy-nilly. It requires care, attention to detail, and an understanding of the
media player’s states. Here they are, in the order you’re most likely to encounter them:
䊏 Idle. In this state, the MediaPlayer doesn’t know anything and, consequently,
cannot actually do anything. To move on to the initialized state, you’ll need to tell
it which ﬁle it’s going to play. This is done through the setDataSource method.
䊏 Initialized. At this point, the media player knows what you’d like it to play,
but it hasn’t acquired the data to do so. This is particularly important to
understand when dealing with playing remote audio from a URL. Calling
prepare or prepareAsync will move it into the prepared state. It will also
load enough data from either the ﬁle system or the Internet to be ready
for playback.
䊏 Prepared. After calling prepare or prepareAsync (and getting a callback),
your media player is ready to rock! At this point, you can call seek (to move
the playhead) or start (to begin playback).
䊏 Playing. Audio is pumping, people are dancing (OK, maybe not), and life is
good. In this state, you can call pause to halt the audio or seek to move the
play position. You end the party by calling stop, which will move the media
player back to the initialized state.

Just because you’ve run out of media to play doesn’t mean your player drops
into the idle state. It will keep the current ﬁle loaded if you want to call start
(which will restart the audio from the beginning) or seek (to move the playhead to
a particular place). Only when you call stop or reset does the MediaPlayer clear
its buﬀers and return to the initialized state, ready for you to call prepare again.

MUSIC 195
PLAYING A SOUND
At its most straightforward, media playback is actually quite easy. Android gives you
helper methods to shepherd your media player from the idle state to the prepared
state if you can specify a file or resource id right away. In this example case, you
can record your own WAV file or use the beeeep file that I included in the example
project. I’ve added the file to the newly created /res/raw/ folder so the application
can load it directly.
Further, I’ve added a button (which you should be a pro at by now) that, when
pressed, will play the recorded audio. Once the button is defined (id beep_button)
in the main.xml layout file and the audio beeeep.wav file is placed in the raw/ folder,
the following code should work like a charm:

MediaPlayer mBeeper;
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
Button beep = (Button)findViewById(R.id.beep_button);
beep.setOnClickListener(this);
mBeeper =
MediaPlayer.create(getApplicationContext(), R.raw.beeeep);
}

As you can see, I’m retrieving the beep_button from the main.xml layout (which
I told the activity would be my screen’s layout) and setting my activity as the click
listener for the button. Last, I use the media player’s create helper method to initial-
ize and prepare the media player with the beeeep.wav ﬁle from the raw/ directory.

PLAYING A SOUND EFFECT

Remember that loading media, even from the res/ folder, can take some time. With
this in mind, I’ve added the media player as a private data member to my Activity
class. This means I can load it once in my onCreate method and then use it every

196 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

time the user presses the button. Speaking of button pressing, here’s the code to
play the sound eﬀect when the button is pressed:

@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
mBeeper.start();
}

CLEANUP
In order to be a good citizen, there’s one more step you need to remember to take:
releasing your resources! That’s right, when your activity closes down, you need
to tell the media player that you’re ﬁnished with it, like so:

@Override
public void onDestroy(){
if(mBeeper != null){
mBeeper.stop();
mBeeper.release();
mBeeper = null;
}
}

Checking for null before performing the cleanup is a good precaution. If, for
whatever reason, there isn’t enough memory to load the resource or it fails for
another reason, you won’t have any null pointer exceptions on your hands.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE

There’s nothing complex about simple sound effect playback. Once you have a
media player in the prepared state, you can call start on it as many times as you
like to produce the desired effect. Just remember to clean it up once you’re finished.
Your users will thank you later. Now let’s move on to something a little more tricky.

MUSIC 197
LONGER-RUNNING
MUSIC PLAYBACK

You didn’t think I’d let you oﬀ that easy, did you? Remember two chapters ago
when I showed you how to build a service in a separate process by using an AIDL
ﬁle? I told you you’d need it for longer-running music playback. Here’s a quick
recap of that process:

1. Create a service, deﬁne a few methods to control music playback, and declare
the service in your manifest.

2. Create an Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL) file to define how

the service will talk to any of the activities.

3. Bind an activity to the service, and, when the callback is hit, save the binder
in order to call the service’s methods.

If most, or any, of those steps don’t make sense, take a gander back at Chapter 6.
In this section, I’ll show you how to turn the empty service into one that actu-
ally plays music in the background. The example music service will have methods
to pause, play, set a data source, and ask it what the title of the current song is. To
show you this service in practice, I’ll have my activity play the most recently added
song on my new background music service.

BINDING TO THE MUSIC SERVICE

There is a little overlap here with Chapter 6, but it’s worth covering how this works
again before I dive into the music service itself. I’ve added the following code to
the onCreate method of our handy MusicExampleActivity.

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

//Button code omitted
Intent serviceIntent =
new Intent(getApplicationContext(), MusicService.class);
startService(serviceIntent);
bindService(serviceIntent, this, 0);
}

198 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

You’ll notice that I’m actually starting the service before I attempt to bind to it.
Although you can ask the bind service call to start the service for you, this is not a
good idea when building a music service. That’s because when you unbind from
the service, which you must do whenever your activity is destroyed, it will shut
the service down. This, as you might imagine, would be bad if you’d like music to
continue playing in the background after your activity has closed.

FINDING THE MOST RECENT TRACK

I’ve added a button to my screen that, when pressed, will query Android’s content
provider for the most recent track. Assuming it has both a track to play and a valid
service, I can start playing music. Here’s the code that runs when the Play button
is pressed:

public void onClick(View v) {

CursorLoader cursorLoader = new
CursorLoader(getApplicationContext(),
MediaStore.Audio.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, null, null,
null, MediaStore.Audio.Media.DATE_ADDED + “ Desc Limit 1”);
cursorLoader.registerListener(0, this);
cursorLoader.startLoading();
}

In this code, I’m using a cursor loader to fetch my rather bizarre query. I’m ask-
ing the content provider for all possible audio tracks, but I’m sorting the results
in descending order of their addition date (that is, when they were added to the
phone) and limiting it to one result. This will, when the loader ﬁnishes, return a
cursor with one record (the most recent song added to the library).

LONGER-RUNNING MUSIC PLAYBACK 199

A NOTE ON LOADERS

Android, in version 3.0, added the Loader class to its arsenal of helpers. A
loader is essentially a simplified version of the AsyncTask class. It processes
or acquires a piece of data off the main thread and then calls your listener
on the main thread when the data is ready. In this chapter, I’m giving it a
query string that, if the user has a lot of media, could take a very long time.
This is an excellent time to deploy one of Android’s loader subclasses: the
CursorLoader. You can user this library on versions of Android older than 3.0
by including the Android compatibility library in your project. To add it, right-
click your project and select Android Tools > Add Compatibility Library.

When the cursor with my data is ready, my activity’s onLoadComplete will be

called, at which point I can tell my music service what to play:

@Override
public void onLoadComplete(Loader<Cursor> loader, Cursor cursor) {
if(!cursor.moveToFirst()){
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), “No Music to Play”,
p Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
return;
}
int idIDX = cursor.getColumnIndex(MediaStore.Audio.Media._ID);
long id = cursor.getLong(idIDX);
if(mService == null){
Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),
“No Service to play Music!”,
Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
return;
}
try{
mService.setDataSource(id);
mService.play();

200 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

Button play = (Button)findViewById(R.id.most_recent_song);
play.setText(“Stop “+mService.getSongTitle());
}catch(Exception E){
Log.e(“MusicPlayerActivity”, “setData failed”,E);
}
cursor.close();
}

When the loader hits my callback, I’ll ﬁrst need to check if it actually found any
data. By checking if(!cursor.moveToFirst()){, I’m moving to the ﬁrst and only
record in the cursor, but I’m also making sure there actually is a record for me to
look at. (If the cursor is empty, moveToFirst will return false.)
Next, I’ll get the column index of the _ID column and call getLong on the cursor
to acquire the media’s unique ID. It is with this ID that I’ll tell the music service
what it should play.
I’ll also need to make sure that my service bind in the onCreate method was
successful. Once I know that the service is valid, I can tell it what entry I want it to
play with setDataSource and then tell it to start playback with play.

PLAYING THE AUDIO IN THE SERVICE

Now that you can see how the ID is acquired, I’ll switch over to the music service
and show you how the handoﬀ occurs over there. Here’s what setDataSource
looks like from the service’s perspective (which we deﬁned the skeleton for earlier):

Cursor mCursor;
MediaPlayer mPlayer = null;
public void setDataSource(long id){
if(mCursor != null){
mCursor.close();
}
mCursor =

LONGER-RUNNING MUSIC PLAYBACK 201

getContentResolver().query(
MediaStore.Audio.Media.EXTERNAL_CONTENT_URI, null,
MediaStore.Audio.Media._ID + “ = “+ id, null, null);
if(mCursor == null)
return;
if(!mCursor.moveToFirst()){
mCursor.close();
mCursor = null;
return;
}
int pathIDX = mCursor.getColumnIndex(MediaStore.Audio.Media.DATA);
String path = mCursor.getString(pathIDX);
try{
mPlayer.reset();
mPlayer.setDataSource(path);
mPlayer.prepare();
}catch(IOException io){
Log.e(“MediaService”, “Unable to set data source”,io);
}
}

While this code is a little bit long, most of it should look similar to tasks you’ve
already done.

1. I’m querying the content provider for the id passed into the method.

2. I’m making sure that the music is actually there ﬁrst by checking if the cur-
sor came back null (which can happen if the SD card has been removed).
I’m also checking that there’s a valid row in the cursor.

202 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

A DIFFERENT WAY

It’s worth noting, again, that I’ve taken the harder of two routes here.
Instead of querying the content provider for the exact media path, I could
build a URI for the media in question and hand it off instead. I’ve taken what
may be a slightly more complex route to playback only so that when you’d
like to get to the file itself, you’ll know how.

3. When I’m sure the cursor is valid and contains the data for a song to play, I
can reset the player (in case it was already playing something else), set the
data source for it, and tell the media player to prepare. Once these methods
are done, the media player is ready to start playback.

With that, your service is ready to go when the activity calls play.

PLAY TIME
Now that the service has a data source and is prepared, the activity can call play,
which will trigger the following code to run:

private void play(){

if(mPlayer != null){
mPlayer.start();
setForegroundState(true);
}
}

You’ll need to start media playback and make sure the service switches to run-
ning in the foreground. setForegroundState is a method I deﬁned back in Chapter 6
that places an icon in the notiﬁcation screen. If you need a refresher on how to
put services into foreground mode, review Chapter 6 or look at the sample code
for this chapter.

LONGER-RUNNING MUSIC PLAYBACK 203

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST END . . . HOPEFULLY
At some point, the music has to stop—either because it’s run out of songs to play
or because the user has killed it oﬀ. My sample code includes a stop method, but
because it looks almost exactly like the play method I listed in the last section, it
doesn’t bear spelling out here. However, because I wanted the service to last beyond
the run of my activity, I’ll need to have the service close itself down. You can ﬁnd
the appropriate time to shut down the service by registering it as an onCompletion
Listener with the media player. The line of code looks like this:

mPlayer.setOnCompletionListener(this);

You can call it at any point after the player is created. Of course, your service
will need to implement OnCompletionListener and have the correct onCompletion
method.

@Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
stopSelf();
}

This means that once the media is ﬁnished, the service will call stop on itself,
which, because of the lifecycle of the service, will trigger Android to call the service’s
onDestroy method—the perfect place to clean up. Once the cleanup is ﬁnished,
the service will be deallocated and cease running.

CLEANUP
Cleanup is essential when dealing with cursors and media players. If you don’t
handle this section correctly, a lot of the device’s memory can get lost in the shuﬄe.
Here’s the onDestroy method where I clean up both the cursor and the media player:

@Override
public void onDestroy(){
super.onDestroy();
if(mCursor != null)

204 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

mCursor.close();
if(mPlayer != null) {
mPlayer.stop();
mPlayer.release();
}
}

I must be careful, because an incorrect data source ID or bad media ﬁle could
leave either of these pointers null, which would crash the service quite handily
when I try to shut them down.

INTERRUPTIONS
When you’re writing music software for Android devices, it’s vitally important that
you remember that the hardware on which your software is running is, in fact, a
phone. This means you’ll need to watch out for several things.
䊏 Audio focus. You’ll need to use the AudioManager class (introduced in
Android 2.2) to register an audio focus listener, because other applications
may want to play alerts, navigational directions, or their own horrible music.
This is vital to making an Android music playback application play nice
with the rest of the system.
䊏 Controls built into headphones. You’ll want your service to register to receive
headset button intents through your manifest (or at runtime when your
service is started). At the very least, set your service up to pause when the
headset control is clicked.
䊏 Phone calls. By watching the phone’s call state either through the Telephony
Manager or with the audio focus tools, you absolutely must watch for incom-
ing phone calls. You must stop all audio when the phone rings. Nothing will
enrage your users (and hurt your ratings) more than not accommodating
phone calls.

LONGER-RUNNING MUSIC PLAYBACK 205

䊏 Missing SD card. You’ll want to make sure your app handles a missing or
removed SD card correctly. Users can mount their external cards as remov-
able drives with the USB cable at any point. Android will alert you if you
listen for the ACTION_MEDIA_REMOVED intent.

This might seem like a lot of things to look out for (and it is), but never fear, the
developers at Google have released an open source media player (which they ship
with the Android source code) that can be a great guide for dealing with this stuﬀ.
As always, the documentation will have a lot on the subject as well.

206 CHAPTER 8 MOVIES AND MUSIC

WRAPPING UP

In this chapter, I showed you how to

䊏 Play a simple video
䊏 Play a sound eﬀect when a button is pressed
䊏 Take a previously created service interface and create a functional media
player from it

You should now be comfortable with the essentials for media playback. If you’re
looking to go further with videos (which I hope you are), you’ll want to look into
using a controller to modify the state of the video view.
Your next step to expand the media playback service is to think about how you’d
pass arrays of IDs (playlists) and how you’d deal with updating those playlists on
the ﬂy (as users change them).
Android can be a very powerful media platform if you’re careful and treat it
with care. Go forth and make a crop of better music players—if for no other reason
than so I can use them myself.

WRAPPING UP 207
9
DETERMINING
LOCATIONS AND
USING MAPS
One of the chief beneﬁts off building
bu
uilding any mobile
mobiile
application is the ability to
o provide
rovide location-aware data to
users. Android is no exception.
eption. Taking advantage of your
user’s location to help them make informed decisions should
always be in the back of your mind. There is, however, a little
to know about the basics of determining and using the device’s
location. I will show you a few tricks for speedy acquisition and
then quickly show you how to display Android’s built-in Google
Maps view.

209
LOCATION BASICS

All location information on Android’s systems is reached through Android’s Location

Manager class. There is, as you might have guessed, a permission requirement
before you can access the user’s location ﬁeld.

MOTHER MAY I?
If you want to get the location of a user’s device, you’ll need to add the location
permission to your manifest. Depending on the level of location data you want to
acquire, you’ll need to declare one of the following permissions:

<uses-permission
android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION”/>
<uses-permission
android:name=”android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION” />

The <uses-permission> tag should be declared inside the manifest but outside
the <application> section.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR

Some users, bless their paranoid cotton socks, pay very close attention to the
permissions you request in your manifest (each permission generates a warning
when the app is purchased or downloaded from the Android Market). Several
high-profile applications have been hit by negative reviews and user outrage for
adding a location permission that didn’t make sense. If you’re going to use the
location services on the device, make sure it’s for the direct benefit of your users.
Do otherwise, and your users will find out. Further, it’s always a good idea to have
a webpage that explains each permission you use. Those who care about it will
find their way to it—and if they’re informed, they will be less likely to complain.

210 CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS

FINDING A GOOD SUPPLIER
Your first step in using the location service, after you’ve added the permission of
course, is finding a good supplier. Each device could have several different location
services beyond the time- and power-consuming GPS system. Android allows you to
specify criteria for the eventual provider you’ll use. You do this by building a list of fea-
tures you’d like and then asking Android for the one that best suits your needs. Here’s
a rather idealistic example I’ve put together using the getBestProvider method:

private String getBestProvider(LocationManager locationManager){

Criteria criteria = new Criteria();
criteria.setAccuracy(Criteria.ACCURACY_COARSE);
criteria.setPowerRequirement(Criteria.POWER_LOW);
criteria.setCostAllowed(false);
return locationManager.getBestProvider(criteria, true);
}

Before calling the getBestProvider method, you’ll need to obtain a Location

Manager object, which you can do with the following code:

locationManager = (LocationManager)getSystemService
p (Context.LOCATION_SERVICE);

Typically, I’ll stash this pointer away somewhere so I never have to ﬁnd it again.

GETTING THE GOODS

Once you’ve received the string ID for your ideal provider, you can register and start
receiving location updates from the provider. Here’s the code to register for updates:

locationManager.requestLocationUpdates(provider, 60000, 1000, this);

LOCATION BASICS 211

Calling this requestLocationUpdates method (which you’ll need to deﬁne)
will result in the onLocationChanged method being invoked every time the user’s
location is changed according to the criteria you set. Along with the provider string,
you’ll need to tell the system the minimum time between updates (in my case, 60
seconds—the documentation suggests not having it poll any faster than that), the
minimum distance between intervals (in my case, 1000 meters), and the object that
implements the LocationListener interface you want to receive callbacks. Here
are the methods you’re required to override:

public void onLocationChanged(final Location location) {}

@Override
public void onProviderDisabled(String provider) {}
@Override
public void onProviderEnabled(String provider) {}
@Override
public void onStatusChanged(String provider, int status,
p Bundle extras) {}

The method I’m most interested in, in this case, is the onLocationChanged
method. It will pass me that all-important location object. With that data, I can
then call getLatitude and getLongitude. And with that, I know—with as much
accuracy as possible—where in the world the device is.
Further, the LocationManager object contains an important static helper
method called distanceBetween that will calculate the distance between geo-
graphic points. I point out this helper because I ﬁnd myself using it all the time.

212 CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS

THE SNEAKY SHORTCUT
It can sometimes take many seconds for the location manager to spit out a user’s
location. There’s a solution you can take advantage of to at least display an old value
while the real location is being determined. You can, either before or after register-
ing your listener, call getLastKnownLocation on your provider. This can provide
some interesting results (especially if the device has spent a long time aloft in an
airplane without an Internet connection), but it can often give the user something
to look at or laugh at while you find their real location. You must, however, have
defined the fine location permission to use this trick.

THAT’S IT!
As much as I would like to say that this is an incredibly complex operation, it’s
about as hard as tying your shoelaces. Given what you’ve been through up to this
point, getting the location from the LocationManager should be a cakewalk. That
said, I had my fair share of issues in writing the code for this chapter. If you are
stumped, check the documentation and press on!

LOCATION BASICS 213

SHOW ME THE MAP!

FIGURE 9.1 Although strange,

this is how your Android
settings should look.

Determining your user’s location is one thing, but actually putting those two inde-
cipherable numbers (longitude and latitude) into context is where software gets a
little more complex. Interestingly enough, the conﬁguration needed to get a map
onscreen is far more complex than the code to manipulate it. So, let’s get started.
If you want to follow along, go ahead and create a new Android project, and we’ll
start from there.

GETTING THE LIBRARY

The MapActivity and MapView are two classes available only in Google’s API superset
(APIs) of the Android SDK. In order to have access to them, you’ll need to declare
that your application uses the Google APIs library. You’ll need to download this
super-library (the same way you got the Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread
SDKs back in Chapter 1). Figure 9.1 shows what the settings screen for your project
should look like if you’ve got it dialed in correctly.
Once you’ve set up your SDK values correctly, there are a few things in the
manifest I need to talk with you about.

ADDING TO THE MANIFEST

There are two critical things that, through the manifest, you need to tell the system.
The ﬁrst is that your application uses the Google Maps library. The second is that
you need permission to access the Internet. While you will not have to call anything
directly to get online, the map view will. Here’s what the tail end of your manifest
should look like with these two additions:

214 CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS

Again, you’re telling Android that

䊏 You’ll be referencing the Google Maps libraries.
䊏 You need permission to access the Internet.

Now, with that out of the way, it’s time to switch your boring Activity to a
bigger, sexier MapActivity class.

CREATING THE MAPACTIVITY

Switching your default activity to a map activity requires you to add the appropri-
ate Java include path and a required method. When you’re ﬁnished, it will look
something like this:

public class MapsExampleProjectActivity extends MapActivity {

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
}
@Override
protected boolean isRouteDisplayed() {
return false;
}
}

SHOW ME THE MAP! 215

Now that you have your Activity class switched over to the MapActivity class,
you can add a MapView to your main.xml layout ﬁle.

CREATING A MAPVIEW
This is the view into which Android will draw its map tiles. It behaves exactly like any
other view, with one notable exception: You need an API key to access Google Maps.

PLACING THE MAPVIEW

Here’s what my simple main.xml ﬁle looks like right now:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

As you can see, I’ve placed my map view as the only one onscreen. You can
actually place it anywhere you want, just as you would position any other view.
Further, it doesn’t require, as the ListActivity does, a special reserved Android
ID. Let me show you where to get the value that you’ll place in the apiKey ﬁeld.

216 CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS

SIGNING UP FOR A MAP KEY
Getting a map key is pretty easy. Head over to http://code.google.com/android/
maps-api-signup.html and run the command they suggest:

keytool -list -keystore ~/.android/debug.keystore

From the sign-up page, you must agree to their terms (which you should prob-
ably read ﬁrst), enter the output from your keytool command, and get your API
key. Toss that string into the apiKey section (the highlighted line in the main.xml
code) of the MapView, and you’re good to go. Remember, the map key is bound to
whatever key you signed your .apk with (in this case, the debugging one). When
you sign your .apk for release, you’ll need to remember to generate a new key for it.

TIP: If the keytool asks for a password, the default is “android.”

RUN, BABY, RUN

You’ve conﬁgured everything, dotted all your i’s, and crossed all your t’s. It’s time
to take this map view out for a spin. When it comes time to move and render the
map, you’ll be primarily interfacing with the MapControl, which you’ll actually
retrieve from the map view itself. The simple work for my example is all done in
my sample code’s onCreate method:

MapView mv;
MapController controller;
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
mv = (MapView)findViewById(R.id.map_view);
controller = mv.getController();
GeoPoint point = new GeoPoint((int)(40.734641 * 1e6),
p (int)(-73.996181 * 1e6));
controller.animateTo(point);
controller.setZoom(12);
}

SHOW ME THE MAP! 217

FIGURE 9.2 New York City.
The biggest small town you’ll
ever know.

In this code, I’m doing a few important things:

1. Retrieving the MapView from my layout with the inimitable findViewById

method.

2. Obtaining and manipulating the MapController.

3. Creating a new GeoPoint on which to center the map view.

The location listed in the example happens to be New York City (where I’m
currently writing this book), and I’ve set the zoom level high enough that you can
almost see my house—all right, maybe not! Figure 9.2 shows what all your hard
work thus far has yielded.

218 CHAPTER 9 DETERMINING LOCATIONS AND USING MAPS

GeoPoint s

Google, in its not-so-infinite wisdom, decided that GeoPoints for the map
view should not accept latitude and longitude values in degrees like every
other API in the SDK. Instead, they take them in 1e6 values. This means,
simply, that you must multiply any latitude or longitude value you wish to
reference in the map view by 1e6 before handing off. Interesting map errors
will result if you forget this step.

WRAPPING UP
In this chapter, I showed you the very basics for ﬁnding a device’s location and
displaying a map onscreen. If you’re looking to go further into this topic, you should
explore map overlays through the OverlayItem class. Overlays let you point out
speciﬁc locations (addresses, businesses, or cat pictures) to your users.
As always, be very careful what kind of location services you use, especially
while the user is not in your application. Nothing will drain a user’s battery faster—
and make them angrier—than heavy locational lookups in the background. If
you’re planning a very location-heavy application, be sure to do LOTS of battery-
draw testing before you release it. Your users and your application’s ratings will
be much happier for it.

WRAPPING UP 219
10
TABLETS,
FRAGMENTS, AND
ACTION BARS,
OH MY
With the release of Honeycomb
ycomb and Ice Cream
m
Sandwich, Google has introduced
oduced
duced a totally new form factor
to the Android landscape.
pe. In Gingerbread and earlier,
Google had sought to handle only small handset screens. With
these new versions of Android, you now must deal with the much
larger screens of tablets.

Google has introduced the concept of the fragment (to handle

the extra screen real estate and to maintain compatibility with
smaller, phone-sized screens) and the action bar (to replace the
options menu).

221
FRAGMENTS

Fragments, conceptually, are like activities with a slightly more complex lifecycle.
They can be given a screen to themselves if there isn’t much room, or they can be
placed with many other fragments on a larger tablet screen. An activity can contain
any number of fragments. In this way, the Android SDK allows you to expand and
collapse the views in your application to take advantage of more and less screen
space. There is one thing that the activity can do that the fragment cannot—namely,
the activity can register for intents in the manifest; fragments rely on their host
activity to pass on launch information. Further, it’s important to implement frag-
ments such that they are totally unaware of what other fragments are visible. This
becomes important, because you’ll want to change that conﬁguration depending
on how much space you have.
If you’re planning on coding along with me in this chapter, make sure you have a
project that is set to version 3.0 or higher of the Android SDK (API Level 11 or greater).

THE LIFECYCLE OF THE FRAGMENT

Fragments have fairly complex lifecycles. There are many methods to explore, but
onCreateView must be implemented for the fragment to appear onscreen. onCreate
View is your fragment’s one chance to create a view to display onscreen. If you fail
to return a view to the system, your application will crash and burn.
Here is the startup lifecycle; the methods are listed in the order the system
will call them:
䊏 onAttach. This is called when your fragment is attaching to an activity.

䊏 onCreate. This is called when the fragment is being initialized. This is a

great place to initialize any variables you’ll need later.
䊏 onCreateView. This is your opportunity to create and return the fragment’s
root view. This is the ﬁrst method that will be called if your fragment is
returning to the screen after having been previously paused.
䊏 onStart. Similar to the same call on the activity, this is called when the
fragment is about to be placed onscreen.
䊏 onResume. This is called when the fragment is back onscreen.

222 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

At this point, your fragment is frolicking on the screen, receiving touch and key
events, or just hanging around and looking great. If the user leaves the screen or
switches to a view that no longer includes the fragment, the following shutdown
lifecycle will take place:
䊏 onPause. This is called if the fragment is removed from the screen or the
user presses the home button. This is the only part of the shutdown life-
cycle you’re guaranteed to get (it would be the only method you get in the
rare situation that your application is put in the background and then your
process is killed due to resource constraints). onPause is the best time for
you to save any data or state information that you want the user to be able
to see when the fragment is resumed later.
䊏 onStop. Similar to the activity’s version of this method, onStop is called
when your fragment has left the screen. It tends to be called in conjunction
with the activity’s onStop method.
䊏 onDestroyView. This is your last chance to pull data out of the views before
they go away.
䊏 onDestroy. This is called when the fragment is being removed from the
screen and will not return. This is the time to make sure all your threads are
stopped, loaders are canceled, and any broadcast receivers are unregistered.
䊏 onDetach . Called as the fragment loses its association with an activity,
onDetach is the last of your methods the system will call before the fragment
heads to the great garbage collector in the sky.

FRAGMENTS 223
CREATING A FRAGMENT
To create a fragment, you’ll need to make a Java class that extends the Fragment
class. An incredibly simple implementation would look something like this:

public class ContentFragment extends Fragment{

@Override
public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater,
ViewGroup container, Bundle savedInstanceState) {
View v = inflater.inflate(R.layout.content_layout, null);
}
}

Fragments, of course, need their own layouts to show anything onscreen. This
ContentFragment class will just show a simple text view. Here is the content_
layout.xml ﬁle whose contents will be drawn as the fragment itself:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

224 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

With the XML layout ﬁle and the new ContentFragment class, you’ll have a very
basic but functional fragment for displaying text on the screen. Later methods can
call the fragment’s getView method and findViewById on that view to get and
modify the required child views. Here’s what a method to change the contents of
the text view might look like:

private void setContentText(String text){

TextView tv =
(TextView)getView().findViewById(R.id.content_text_view);
tv.setText(text);
}

Keep in mind, however, that the getView method works only after you’ve
returned from onCreateView. While you now have a fully functioning fragment,
you still need to make it appear onscreen.

SHOWING A FRAGMENT
There are two main ways one can make fragments appear onscreen.

USING XML
You can declare a fragment in an XML layout to make the fragment appear onscreen,
like so:

File: res/layout/content_activity_layout.xml
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/
p apk/res/android”
android:layout_width=”fill_parent”
android:layout_height=”fill_parent”
android:orientation=”vertical” >
<fragment android:name=”com.haseman.fragments.ContentFragment”
android:layout_width=”match_parent”

FRAGMENTS 225
android:layout_height=”match_parent”
android:id=”@+id/list_fragment”/>
</LinearLayout>

This layout can then be set as the content view for a FragmentActivity, like so:

public class ContentViewingActivity extends FragmentActivity{

public void onCreate(Bundle data){
super.onCreate(data);
setContentView(R.layout.content_activity_layout);
}
}

Figure 10.1 shows the results of using XML to make the fragment appear
onscreen.

THE FragmentActivity CLASS

The FragmentActivty is a special class you’ll need to use only if you want to
work with fragments on versions of Android earlier than 3.0. For Honeycomb
and Ice Cream Sandwich, a simple activity contains all the pieces you need
to interact with fragments. You can find the FragmentActivity class in the
Android compatibility library.

226 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

FIGURE 10.1 A fragment with
a single text view.

FRAGMENTS 227
Fragments, when set up this way, can be placed onscreen the same way as views.
Here’s an XML layout to show a list view with the text view next to it:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

I’ve used a linear layout and some weighting in the fragments to give the Demo
ListFragment the left one-third of the screen and the ContentFragment the right
two-thirds. (If you’re wondering about DemoListFragment, you can ﬁnd it in the
sample code for this chapter.)
Figure 10.2 shows what it looks like on a tablet.

228 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

USING THE FRAGMENT MANAGER FIGURE 10.2 Two fragments
Although being able to lay out fragments in the XML ﬁles is great, you’ll want to on one screen.
be able to interact with the fragments on your screen at runtime as well. For this,
you’ll use the FragmentManager, which is Android’s tool to manipulate fragments.
Getting a fragment manager on Honeycomb and later requires you to call get
FragmentManager. Getting a fragment manager for earlier devices requires you to
call getSupportFragmentManager from a FragmentActivity.
You can add fragments to the screen programmatically with the following code:

FragmentManager manager = getSupportFragmentManager();

FragmentTransaction ft = manager.beginTransaction();
ft.add(containerViewId, new DemoListFragment());
ft.commit();

FRAGMENTS 229
The variable containerViewId should refer to an existing ViewGroup in your
activity’s layout where the new fragment should be placed. You can also, at a later
time, replace one fragment with another by calling replace(containerViewId,
newFragment);, where containerViewId speciﬁes the view container that cur-
rently holds the fragment you’d like to replace. You can replace only fragments that
were previously added using a FragmentManager transaction; fragments declared
statically in XML layouts cannot be replaced.
By using either XML or the fragment manager to set up and modify views, you
should have no trouble building complex, scalable, and beautiful applications that
render well on both handsets and tablets.
Remember that all fragments should work independently of their siblings
(much in the same way that activities should stay independent), even if they might
share the same screen.
Given the power of Android’s layout folders (which we covered at length in
Chapters 3 and 7), you should see the possibilities in building one layout for tablets
(which could have several fragments on it) and building another for small-screened
phones (which would have only one visible fragment at a time).
If you’re looking for a simple example, I highly recommend you take a look at
the project in the sample code for this chapter.

PROVIDING BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY

Android has, thankfully, bundled fragments into their compatibility library. This
means you can work with fragments even if you’re planning on supporting pre-3.0
devices. I highly recommend that you use it whenever you can. Installing it is as
simple as clicking the menu item shown in Figure 10.3.
Take note, however, that building your project against a 3.0 or higher version and
still using the compatibility libraries at the same time can get a little complicated. If
you’re doing this, make sure all your imports come from the support library like this:

import android.support.v4.app.Fragment;

instead of like this:

import android.app.Fragment;

230 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

FIGURE 10.3 Installing the
compatibility library.

Using the support library will ensure that your application will run correctly
on newer and older systems alike.
Further, if you’re planning on using the compatibility library and fragments,
remember that you’ll need to use a FragmentActivity instead of a regular Activity.
With the compatibility support and the dynamic nature of fragments, it becomes
quite possible to create an application with a great interaction model that works
well on both phones and tablets. I don’t have time to spell it all out here, but there
is sample code for achieving this in the companion source code for this chapter.
Remember what you’ve read here, and take a look through it.

FRAGMENTS 231
THE ACTION BAR

FIGURE 10.4 A basic action bar.

With the transition from Android 2.3 to 3.0, Google has eliminated both the search
button and the menu key. From personal experience, I can tell you that many new
users never ﬁnd functionality that is placed in the options menu. Its removal from
the system is, indeed, a very good thing.
Google, bless their expensive cotton socks, has moved the icons that used to
reside in the options menu to the action bar. Further, you can specify a search view
in the action bar (to replace the search button). This takes up more screen space,
but on a tablet (and on later phones), there is more than enough space to go around.
The action bar now represents the primary way your users will navigate through
your Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich application. Sadly, this new tool is avail-
able only through versions 3.0 (target 11) or later. It would require a fair amount of
typing, but it’s very possible to emulate the action bar on earlier systems by using
a simple linear layout and a few image views. You are, however, on your own to
implement it. There is no support for the action bar in the compatibility library.

SHOWING THE ACTION BAR

Since the action bar is supported only in SDK versions 3.0 and later, your manifest
will have to explicitly declare that it supports target 11 or greater.

<uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion=”7”
android:targetSdkVersion=”11”
/>

At this point, when your project is built and run on any Honeycomb and later
system, you should see a basic version of the action bar containing your applica-
tion’s icon and the default title of the activity (Figure 10.4).

232 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

ADDING ELEMENTS TO THE ACTION BAR
In addition to allowing you to set your own title with a call to setTitle, the action
bar can handle three diﬀerent types of objects:
䊏 Icons. Both in a drop-down menu on the right-hand side and as actionable
items in the bar itself.
䊏 Tabs. Buttons along the top, built to manipulate fragments on the screen.
䊏 Action views. Search boxes and drop-down lists (for things like sort orders,
account selection, or death-ray intensities).

Further, Android will always make your application icon (farthest to the left)
clickable. It is expected that tapping this icon will, by default, return the user to
your application’s home screen (whatever this means to your application’s behav-
ior). You can also visually indicate that the home icon will go one level back in the
activity stack by calling setDisplayHomeAsUpEnabled(true).
The way you make changes to what’s in the action bar is very similar to how
you used to interact with the options menu. This is not by accident. Because the
action bar is supposed to replace the options menu, you call methods and conﬁgure
ﬁles similarly to how you used to deal with the menu. This also makes it easy to
gracefully degrade service to phones on older versions of the Android SDK.

ADDING AN ICON
Icons are most easily placed in the action bar by extending onCreateOptionsMenu
and adding the menu icons you’d like. I’ve added a delete icon to the action bar
with the following code:

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu){
MenuItem item = menu.add(“delete”);
item.setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_delete);
if(Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= 11){
item.setShowAsAction(MenuItem.SHOW_AS_ACTION_IF_ROOM);
}
return true;
}

THE ACTION BAR 233

FIGURE 10.5 Adding an If the Android SDK is greater than 3.0, the system will call this method when
action icon. the activity is starting (so it can build the action bar). You’ll notice that I’m calling
setShowAsAction only if we’re running on Honeycomb or later. Figure 10.5 shows
FIGURE 10.6 A non-action icon.
what the action bar looks like on a handset running Ice Cream Sandwich.
If you omit the call to setShowAsAction on a Honeycomb tablet, you’ll see an
options menu icon that contains the menu item on the right side. On Ice Cream
Sandwich, it will move the menu item to a more traditional contextual menu.
Figure 10.6 shows what it looks like on a tablet after I’ve clicked it.

REACTING TO ICON CLICKS

When the user clicks one of your action bar icons, Android will call your implementa-
tion of the onOptionsItemSelected method. Here’s my very simple example method:

public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item){

int id = item.getItemId();
if(id == android.R.id.home){
//The user clicked the left-hand app icon.
//As this is the home screen, ignore it.
return true;
}
else{
//Perform the delete action here
return true;
}
}

234 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

With that, you should have the basics of creating both options menu and action
bar icons. Alternatively, you can declare your icons as XML files and inflate them
using the MenuInflater. Check the documentation (http://developer.android.com/ FIGURE 10.7 A tab bar in
guide/topics/ui/menus.html) for a complete rundown on how to use XML files in Google Calendar.
/res/menu to streamline the process.

ADDING A TAB
Placing a tab in the action bar is a totally diﬀerent process. You’ll use the ActionBar
class itself to add them. Further, you’ll need to implement an ActionBar.Tab
Listener (it tells the system, through a series of overridden methods, what to do
when the tab is tapped by the user).
Once you’ve implemented your listener, you should then add the following
code to your activity’s onCreate method:

ActionBar bar = getActionBar();

bar.setNavigationMode(ActionBar.NAVIGATION_MODE_TABS);
ActionBar.Tab tab1 = bar.newTab();
tab1.setText(“Tab Text”);
tab1.setTabListener(new ExampleTabListener());
bar.addTab(tab1);

For each tab you’d like to add, you must go through the process of request-
ing a new tab from the action bar, setting the listener, and then adding it to the
action bar. Figure 10.7 shows a great-looking example of a tab bar in the Google
Calendar application.
Each tab will trigger diﬀerent events on the fragments within an activity. For
the Google Calendar application, it will hide and show the various ways in which
the user could view their calendar.

THE ACTION BAR 235

FIGURE 10.8 A drop-down list
action view.

USING ACTION VIEWS

Action views (like search and menu drop-downs) are somewhat complex and thus
are impossible to go into in great detail here. You can use them to add search ﬁelds
(as there is no longer a hard search button in Honeycomb and beyond) as well as
drop-down menus. Figure 10.8 shows the same calendar picker implemented as
a drop-down menu on a phone running Ice Cream Sandwich.
For more information on how to make drop-down lists, search ﬁelds, and even
your own custom views, check the ActionBar documentation at http://developer
.android.com/guide/topics/ui/actionbar.html.

236 CHAPTER 10 TABLETS, FRAGMENTS, AND ACTION BARS, OH MY

WRAPPING UP

As you can see, Google has been very busy building new user interface paradigms
for tablets in Honeycomb. Once they settled on how to make the tablets work, they
added those new UI methods to the telephone world with Ice Cream Sandwich.
Using the action bar, Google was able to do away with two hard menu but-
tons (options menu and search), while keeping those concepts active in the user
experience. The options menu button was replaced by icons added to the action
bar, and the search button was replaced by the ability to add custom action views
to that very same bar.
With fragments, Google has enabled us to place more or less on the screen as
the available real estate shifts between devices. Through fragments, we are no
longer limited to having one thing on the screen at any given time. However, if
we need to handle smaller screens, fragments make it easy to shift back into the
one-thing-per-screen layout.
Fragments and the action bar are very new concepts, and it’s clear that Android
developers are still trying to ﬁgure out how best to use them. Please, help us to
push the mobile user experience forward by implementing your own killer user
interfaces using these new toys Google has given us.

WRAPPING UP 237
11
PUBLISHING YOUR
APPLICATION
For the most part, the Android
ndrroid Market is on
one
ne
of the easiest-to-use application
lication
ation stores I’ve ever encoun-
encoun-
tered. But although you can update an application almost
instantly without any of the hassles of other app stores, there are
still a few things you should be aware of before you publish. We’ll
cover packaging, versioning, and creating a release build.

239
PACKAGING AND VERSIONING

There are a few key points in your manifest that you need to pay attention to before
you consider producing a release build to go to market. You’ll need to make sure
your application isn’t debuggable (not so much an issue with newer versions of
the Android client). You’ll also want to make sure your package name is unique
and consistent in each subsequent version. Last, there are two ﬁelds to pay atten-
tion to when upgrading an existing application. Let’s take a closer look at all three.

PREVENTING DEBUGGING
Shipping your application out the door with debugging enabled will allow anyone
with a micro USB cable to step through lines of code in your app, look at the con-
tents of variables, and do other things that no security-aware engineer would like
to have happen. The debugging ﬂag is turned oﬀ by default, but if you’ve turned
it on, it will appear in the application portion of the manifest:

When the application ships, make sure that you either remove the line entirely
or set the following:

android:debuggable=”false”

NAMING THE PACKAGE

The package you declare in your manifest can, for the most part, contain almost
any string you fancy. I’ve highlighted one from a previous example here:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

240 CHAPTER 11 PUBLISHING YOUR APPLICATION

Although I named this package to correspond to my layouts example, you could
just as easily declare a package like

package=”com.sparkle.pants.fairy.dust.unicorn”

I wouldn’t recommend using the unicorn example (it’s somewhat outrageous),

but the fact remains that you can. However, the package name you choose must
be diﬀerent from all other existing packages in the entire Android Market. Be sure
it’s unique and that it’s something you can live with for as long as you upgrade the
application. When you upgrade your app, it absolutely must have the same pack-
age name as the build that came before it. Typically, the naming convention goes
something like com.company_name.product_name. But again, the package name
for your application is entirely up to you.

VERSIONING
There are two values to pay attention to when updating an existing application. First,
you should (but are not required to) increase the value inside the versionName field of
the manifest declaration. Standard rules for the version number apply: Major releases
get a new primary number (1.0 to 2.0), while small patches should get a secondary
bump (1.0 to 1.1). The version name is what shows to the user in the Android Market
and in your application’s details screen. The version name is “1.0” in the previous
example’s manifest file.
The field you must pay careful attention to is versionCode. This is the value
that must change every time you do an update for the Android Market. Sending an
update to the Android Market will be rejected unless you change the versionCode.
Typically, Android developers will make the version code by taking the periods out
of the version name and padding each portion of the name to create a two-digit
number for each section. The number must be unique, but it does not necessarily
have to be sequential. So version 1.0.1 would become 010001, and 2.3.12 would
become 020312. This is a pretty basic way to make sure your version names stay
tied to the version code without much complexity. It’s a good idea to make this
number constantly grow even though, according to the documentation, it isn’t
technically required to. However, adopting a convention of incrementing the num-
bers ensures it will be unique.

PACKAGING AND VERSIONING 241

SETTING A MINIMUM SDK VALUE
The Android Market requires that you specify a minimum SDK value for your
application. You can do this in the manifest by including the uses-sdk ﬁeld, like so:

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8”?>

The number in minSdkVersion corresponds to the integer value for the SDK. In
this case, by declaring version 7, I’m not allowing phones earlier than the Android
2.1 update 1 (which is SDK version 7) to install my application. Be sure to test your
application on the versions you support, even if you just test it brieﬂy with an
emulator.

242 CHAPTER 11 PUBLISHING YOUR APPLICATION

PACKAGING AND SIGNING

FIGURE 11.1 Exporting a

release build.

So your version number is sorted, your code is tested, and all your resources are
in place—it’s time to make a release build before submitting.
There are two ways you can go about producing your ﬁnal APK: through Apache’s
ant (which will build your application from the command line in conjunction with
the build.xml ﬁle) or through Eclipse’s Android tools. If you’re comfortable with
the command line, I’m going to assume you can create a release build on your own.
In this chapter, I’ll focus on creating your release build through Eclipse.

EXPORTING A SIGNED BUILD

The Eclipse tools make it very easy to produce an eﬀective release build. Simply
right-click your project in the Package Explorer, and choose Android Tools > Export
Signed Application Package (Figure 11.1).

PACKAGING AND SIGNING 243

REMEMBER TO DISABLE LOGGING

Before you ship anything, run through your code base and make sure there
are no extra logging lines that you don’t want anyone with a micro USB
cable to see. Remember, too, that applications with the right permissions can
view log output. That said, shipping your application with some logging in
place for catastrophic errors isn’t that bad an idea (in case there are failures
in the field).

You’ll be asked if you want to use an existing keystore file or create a new one.
Because this is your first time releasing your product, you’ll need to create a new
one. Enter a location for the file, or click the Browse button to find one. Enter a
password, and re-enter it to confirm that it is correctly typed (Figure 11.2). The
keystore is a file that can contain any number of keys. For your purposes, you’ll
only really need one key. All your applications can be signed with the same one,
or you can use different keys—it’s up to you (but I recommend using only one,
because it’s less to keep track of).

BACKING UP YOUR KEYSTORE FILE

I’ll say it again: Back up your keystore file. If I could invent a way to make an
HTML <blink> tag in a printed book, I would do it here. The Android Market will
not let you upgrade an application if you haven’t signed it with the same key. If
you lose the keystore file you’ve just created, you’ll never be able to upgrade your
application. Burn it to a disk, and store the disk somewhere other than your house.
Save it in the cloud (Amazon S3, Dropbox, your mother’s house) in as many safe
places as you can.
Once you’ve created your keystore, Eclipse will ask you to create a key. You aren’t
required to fill in all the lower fields. If you do, however, you should probably take
it a little more seriously than I did in Figure 11.3.

244 CHAPTER 11 PUBLISHING YOUR APPLICATION

You’ll be creating a key (to place in your new keystore file) that requires an alias FIGURE 11.2 Creating a
and its own password. keystore file.
Be sure that you make the number you use for the Validity field large enough to
FIGURE 11.3 Creating a key.
be valid for a very, very long time. You never know, Android could still be around one
thousand years from now. It pays to be prepared. Last, you’ll need to fill out at least
one of the several remaining fields, but I recommend you fill in as many as apply.
Click Next to create your key. You’ll just need to tell Eclipse where to put your
APK, and you’re finished!

REMEMBER TO ZIPALIGN

For you command-line users, one thing that Eclipse is doing for its users
is a tool called Zipalign (found in the tools/ folder of the SDK). Zipalign
decreases your application’s load times. If you’re using the Eclipse tools, it’s
already happening for you automatically. If you aren’t using Eclipse, make
sure you take this step on the command line after you’ve signed the build.
It’s speed for free, so make sure you take advantage of it.

PACKAGING AND SIGNING 245

SUBMITTING YOUR BUILD

At this point, it’s time to sign up for a developer account and submit your build.
Android’s application submission page is fairly self-explanatory, but I should point
out that it’s important to provide the Market with as many screenshots, videos, and
graphical assets as you have time to generate. Making the decision to purchase an
application can, if you can believe it, be a diﬃcult one. Users need to be able to
trust that your application actually works as advertised, so giving them a sneak
peek is essential.

WATCH YOUR CRASH REPORTS AND FIX THEM

The marketplace provides a very helpful capability: Users, when they experience a
crash, have the option of reporting that crash to you. Take advantage of it as much
as possible. Get in touch with users, and ﬁx absolutely everything you can. When
you get stuck, go online and use every resource available (your favorite search
engine, Google Groups, or Stack Overﬂow, to name a few). If you’re seeing a crash
you don’t understand, chances are high that other developers have battled the
same thing; we’re a very helpful bunch.

UPDATE FREQUENTLY
Your application, after you submit it, will show up in the Market within hours. This
allows you to frequently update in order to add small features, ﬁx bugs, and make
small tweaks. No other platform allows you this kind of speed from submission
to availability. Use it. You’ll be amazed by how grateful your users will be if you
respond to their problems quickly.

246 CHAPTER 11 PUBLISHING YOUR APPLICATION

WRAPPING UP

In parting, I want to give you one more piece of advice: Make a meaningful contribu-
tion to the Android landscape. While you’ll undoubtedly have questions that this
book cannot answer, you now have the vocabulary and knowledge that will allow
you to ﬁnd answers. This means you have no excuse but to make something amazing.
Please—the Android Market is, for lack of a better phrase, full of crap. The world
doesn’t need another ﬂatulence app; we need things that make data more accessible,
meaningful, fun, useful, and interesting. Do not build apps, build applications.
Good luck, and happy hacking.

WRAPPING UP 247
INDEX

: (colon), using with services, 161 receiving events, 41

screen layout, 27–29
separating from layout ﬁles, 178
A
setContentView method, 28, 33
AbsoluteLayout, 78–82 StrictMode.enableDefaults, 120
action bar TextView ID, 27
action views, 236 Activity class, creating, 25–27
adding icons to, 233–234 activity declaration, android:name tag, 23
adding tabs, 235 Adapter class
delete icon, 233 getCount method, 138
drop-down list action view, 236 getItem method, 138
features of, 232 getItemId method, 138
icon clicks, 234–235 GetView method, 139
showing, 232 interaction with ListView class, 126, 144
activities. See also intents adapters, customizing, 138–140
bundle objects, 35 adb pull /data/anr/traces.txt command line, 102
colliding, 44–45 ADT plug-in, adding to Eclipse, 8–9
considering for applications, 49 AIDL (Android Interface Deﬁnition Language), 160–162
constructor, 31 Android, older versions of, 182–184
creating, 24–27 android create project command, 16
data retention methods, 35 Android Developers website, 4
destroying, 32, 36 Android folder, displaying, 14
getting intents, 31 Android phone
Intent class, 37 USB debugging, 12
intents, 29–31, 37 using, 12
key handling method, 29 Android projects
launching, 28–30 creating, 14–16
listening for key events, 28 creating from command line, 16
locating, 25 DDMS perspective, 17
NewActivity class, 39 Java package, 15
onCreate method, 24, 31–33 naming, 15
onDestroy method, 31, 34 naming activities, 15
onKeyDown method, 28–30, 40 naming applications, 15
onPause method, 31, 34 running, 17
onResume method, 31 selecting, 14
OnRetainNonConfigurationInstance method, 35 selecting version of, 15
onSaveInstanceState method, 35–36 Android SDK
onStart method, 31 downloading, xiv, 4
onStop method, 31, 34 installing for Linux users, 6
public void onCreate(bundle icicle), 32–33 installing for Mac users, 5–6
public void onResume(), 33 installing for Windows users, 6
public void onStart method, 33

248 INDEX
Android SDK Manager B
described, xv
binder service communication, 160–165
locating, xv
binder and AIDL stub, 162–164
using, 6–7
creating services, 161–162
Android Virtual Device (AVD), configuring, 11–12
bitmaps, fetching and displaying, 100–101
AndroidManifest.xml file
BroadcastReceiver
<manifest> declaration, 22
creating for intents, 41–43
package definition, 22
registering, 42–43
android:name tag, 23
self-contained, 44
ANR crashes, tracking down, 102
builds
ant install command, 16
crash reports, 246
API levels, monitoring, 184
submitting, 246
APK file, watching size of, 76
updating, 246
Application class
button bar layout, 87
accessing, 50–51
button_layout.xml file, creating, 172, 174–175
accessing variables, 51
buttons
activities, 49
adding to services, 152
adding data to, 50
layout XML, 170–171
customizing, 48–50
default declaration, 48
getApplication method, 50 C
applications
cache folder, creating for images, 115
minimum SDK value, 242
call state, watching, 205
names, 48–49
cd command, 16
preventing debugging, 240
classes
updating, 241
Activity, 25–27
apps, limiting access to, 180–181
imageReceiver, 119–120
ArrayAdapter class, creating and populating, 131–132
Intent, 37
AsyncTask class, 106–112
Loader, 121
avoiding use of, 112
click events, reacting to, 133
doInBackground method, 106, 109
click listeners
keeping track of, 111
adding to buttons, 65
onPostExecute method, 106, 111
calling for views, 62
onPreExecute method, 106, 109
registering with views, 63
publishProgress method, 110
setting, 65
showing progress, 110
colon (:), using with services, 161
starting within activities, 111
command line, creating projects from, 16
type arguments, 108–109
communication. See also services
using, 111–112
binder service, 160–165
audio, playing in services, 201–204
intent-based, 150–159
AVD (Android Virtual Device), configuring, 11–12
compatibility library, using with fragments, 230–231
content observer, registering, 154

INDEX 249
ContentFragment class, 224–225 locating Android SDK, 9–10
ContentObserver, using with services, 158 Zipalign tool, 245
ContentProvider emulator
cursor for, 159 creating, 10–13
registering observer with, 154 troubleshooting, 18–19
cursor loader, using for music playback, 199 exceptions, handling, 137
cursor.close, calling on cursors, 159 exporting release build
cursors release build, 243
closing for media, 193 signed build, 243–244
moving to media, 192 extended views. See also custom views; views
custom views. See also extended views; views changing colors, 67
adding to XML, 70 creating instances, 68
declaring class for, 65–66 customizing, 66–68
extending, 66, 68–69 ForegroundColorSpan, 66–67
using, 68–70
D
data, fetching and displaying, 100–101
F
DDMS (Dalvik Debug Monitor Server), xv file system cache, relying on, 116
perspective, opening, 17 files, 22
debugging directory, 23
layout issues, 179 locating, 23
preventing, 240 saving to SD cards, 116
dialogs, beware of loading, 110 folders, 22
drawable folders ForegroundColorSpan, using with extended views, 66–67
contents of, 71 FragmentActivity class, 226
referencing, 76 FragmentManager, 229–230
using, 76 fragments
backward compatibility, 230–231
compatibility library, 230–231
E
content view for FragmentActivity, 226
Eclipse IDE, xiv ContentFragment class, 224–225
adding Android plug-in to, 8–9 creating, 224–225
backing up keystore file, 244–246 declaring in XML layout, 225–226
creating activities in, 25–27 DemoListFragment, 228–229
creating emulator, 10–13 features of, 222
creating views, 55 layouts, 224–225
declaring services, 114 lifecycle, 222–223
downloading, 4 onAttach method, 222
exporting signed build, 243–244 onCreate method, 222
IMusicService.java file, 161 onCreateView method, 222
installing, 5 onDestroy method, 223

250 INDEX
onDestroyView method, 223 images
onDetach method, 223 cache folder, 115
onPause method, 223 downloading and displaying, 100–101
onResume method, 222 external storage, 115
onStart method, 222 fetching, 114–120
onStop method, 223 listener for result broadcast, 118–119
placing onscreen, 228–230 notifyFinished method, 118
showing, 225–230 rendering download, 118–120
text view, 225, 227 <include> tag, using for small changes, 172–176
installing
Android SDK for Linux users, 6
G
Android SDK for Mac users, 5–6
GeoPoints, using with maps, 219 Android SDK for Windows users, 6
getApplication method, 50 Eclipse IDE, 5
Google Maps library, 214, 216 Intent class manifest registration, 37–38
gray background, adding to RelativeLayout, 95–96 intent ﬁlters, registering for, 40
intent-based communication, 150–159
H auto image uploading, 150–151
declaring services, 151
hierarchy viewer, locating, xv
getting services, 151
Honeycomb
going to foreground, 155–157
action bar, 232
observing content changes, 158–159
action views, 236
spinning up services, 154–155
FragmentActivity class, 226
starting services, 152–154
FragmentManager, 229
intents. See also activities
Navigation, 232
adding, 38–40
SetShowAsAction, 234
BroadcastReceiver, 41–43
creating, 29–30
I features of, 37
Ice Cream Sandwich getting for activities, 31
action bar, 232 listening for, 41–45
FragmentActivity class, 226 listening for information, 43
Navigation, 232 moving data, 45–47
icon clicks, reacting to, 234–235 receivers, 41–43
icons, adding to action bar, 233–234 receiving, 37
image fetcher registering receivers, 42–43
handleIntent method, 116–117 retrieving and using strings, 46–47
implementing, 116–117 reviewing, 47
image uploading, automatic, 150–151 self-contained BroadcastReceivers, 44
ImageIntentService, 114 stopping listening, 43
imageReceiver class, 119–120 toasts, 42

INDEX 251
IntentService LinearLayouts, 82–89, 130
declaring services, 113–114 button bar layout, 87
fetching images, 114–120 layout of children, 84
nesting layouts, 84
orientation, 86
J
padding option, 88–89
Java versus RelativeLayouts, 84, 89
views in, 56–58 using, 87
versus XML layouts, 60 list element rows, recycling, 144
JSONArray object, using with list views, 139–140 List Fragment, 126
list views
K building, 141–142
custom layout view, 142–143
key, creating, 244–245
fetching data, 138
keystore file
getting Twitter data, 136–138
backing up, 244–245
getTwitterFeed, 138
creating, 244–245
getView code, 142
handling exceptions, 137
L interaction with Adapter class, 144
layout files, separating from activities, 178 JSONArray object, 139–140
layout folders, 170–176 JSONObject, 142
adding suffixes to, 177 ListActivity class, 135–136, 139–140
buttons, 170–171 main layout view, 134–135
contents of, 71, 75–76 onCreate method, 135
<include> tag, 172–176 TextViews, 142–143
MVC (Model-View-Controller), 75 ListActivity class, 139–140
specifying, 172 creating, 128–130
layout issues, debugging, 179 IDs, 129
layout-land folder XML layout file, 128–129
creating, 172 ListView class
defining screens in, 177–178 custom adapter, 138–140
layouts described, 126
AbsoluteLayout, 78–82 Loader class
button bar, 87 described, 121
height and width values, 55, 57, 86 using for music playback, 200–201
LinearLayout, 82–89 location service
nesting, 84 distanceBetween method, 212
RelativeLayout, 90–96 finding supplier, 211
ViewGroup, 77–78 getBestProvider method, 211
XML versus Java, 60 getLastKnownLocation, 213
LocationListener interface, 212

252 INDEX
LocationManager object, 212 Cursor object, 191
onLocationChanged method, 212 loading, 192–193
registering for updates, 211–212 moving cursor to, 192
using, 211 onErrorListener, 194
locations playing, 192–193
adding permission to manifest, 210 playNextVideo, 192
getting for devices, 210 searching SD cards for, 191
<uses-permission> tag, 210 media players
logging, disabling, 244 cleanup, 204–205
onDestroy method, 204–205
MediaPlayer states
M
Idle, 195
main menu Initialized, 195
ArrayAdapter class, 131–132 Playing, 195
click events, 133 Prepared, 195
data, 127 MediaScanner, 191
list items, 130–131 menu list items, text view file, 130–131
ListActivity class, 128–130 <merge> tag, wrapping views in, 176
main thread. See also thread violations methodNotFoundException, 184
being on, 102 Model-View-Controller (MVC), 75
fetching data, 100–101 movie playback
getting back on, 104–105 adding VideoView, 188–189
getting off, 103–105 cleanup, 193
Loader class, 121 closing cursors, 193
recommendations, 102 onDestroy method, 193
manifest, 22 process, 188
map key, getting, 217 setting up for VideoView, 189–190
MapActivity class music playback
availability of, 214 audio focus, 205
creating, 215–216 cleanup, 197, 204–205
MapControl class, 217–218 closing cursors, 204–205
maps crashing service, 205
manifest additions for, 214–215 cursor loader, 199
using GeoPoints with, 219 finding recent track, 199–201
MapView class headphone controls, 205
availability of, 214 icon in notification area, 203
creating, 216–217 interruptions, 205–206
testing, 217–218 Loader class, 200–201
value for apiKey field, 216–217 missing SD card, 206
media onDestroy method, 197, 204
ContentProvider, 190 phone calls, 205
ContentResolver, 191

INDEX 253
music playback (continued ) permission, adding to manifest, 210
playing audio in services, 201–203 phone’s call state, watching, 205
setDataSource, 201–202 photo listening service
setForegroundState method, 203 registering for media notification, 154
sounds, 196–197 starting, 153
stop method, 204 stopping, 153
music service, binding to, 198–199 photos, uploading, 159
MusicExampleActivity, 198 playNextVideo, 192
MVC (Model-View-Controller), 75 preferences, saving usernames to, 182
projects
creating, 14–16
N
creating from command line, 16
New York City, map of, 218 DDMS perspective, 17
NewActivity class, 39 Java package, 15
Next button, creating with RelativeLayout, 93–94 naming, 15
Notification object, creating for services, 156 naming activities, 15
notification pull-down, creating for services, 157 naming applications, 15
running, 17
O selecting, 14
selecting version of, 15
OnClickListener, using with views, 62–65
public void onResume method, using with activities, 33
onCreate method, 24
public void onStart method, using with activities, 33
ListView class, 135
using with views, 63
onDestroy method, using with activities, 34 R
onErrorListener, using with media, 194 reflection
onKeyDown method, using with activities, 28–30, 40 accessing SDK methods with, 183–184
onPause method, using with activities, 34 benefits of, 184
OnRetainNonConfigurationInstance method, 35 methodNotFoundException, 184
onSaveInstanceState method, 35–36 RelativeLayouts, 90–96
onStop method, using with activities, 34 gray background, 95–96
versus LinearLayouts, 84, 89
P Next button, 93–94
padding declaration, 93
packages
<RelativeLayout> declaration, 92
downloading, 6–7
using, 90–96
naming, 240–241
release build, exporting, 243
packaging
res/ folder
and signing, 243–245
contents of, 71
and versioning, 240–242
layout folders, 170–177
padding
resources, finding, 59
LinearLayouts, 88–89
RelativeLayouts, 93

254 INDEX
R.javafile notification pull-down, 157
code, 72 onBind method, 148
creation of, 71 onClickListener, 164
onCreate method, 148
onDestroy method, 149
S
onStartCommand method, 148
saving files to SD cards, 116 setForegroundState method, 155–156
screen layout, creating for activities, 27–29 shutting down, 149
screen sizes, handling, 75, 89 as singletons, 148
screens, defining in layout-land folder, 177–178 Start and Stop buttons, 152
SD card, saving files to, 116 startForeground method, 149
SDK (software development kit) starting, 152–154
downloading, xiv, 4 stopSelf method, 149
installing for Linux users, 6 setContentView method, 28, 33, 55
installing for Mac users, 5–6 setForegroundState method
installing for Windows users, 6 music playback, 203
SDK methods, accessing with reflection, 183–184 using, 155–156
SDK value, setting, 242 SharedPreferences, apply method, 182
SDK version number signed build
declaring support for, 181 exporting, 243–244
finding, 184 keystore file, 244
Service class sound effects, playing, 196–197
described, 148 Start and Stop buttons, adding to services, 152
onBind method, 151 StrictMode.enableDefaults, 120
ServiceExampleActivity, 152–153
services. See also communication
binding and communicating with, 164–165
T
bringing into foreground, 155 tabs, adding to action bars, 235
colon (:) in process, 161 text view
ContentObserver, 158 customizing, 65–66
Context.stopService, 149 grabbing instance of, 59–60
creating, 161–162 TextView class, 142–143
creating notifications, 155–156 TextView ID, creating for activities, 27
cursor for ContentProvider, 159 thread violations, spotting, 120. See also main thread
declaring, 113–114, 151 Toast API, 42
getting, 151 troubleshooting emulator, 18–19
ImageIntentService, 114 Twitter data, creating for list views, 136–138
IMusicService.Stub class, 164 Twitter feed
keeping running, 149 displaying, 143
lifecycle, 148 downloading, 143
main thread, 149 parsing, 143
Notification object, 156 TwitterAsyncTask, 136–138

INDEX 255
U VideoView
adding for movies, 188–189
UI (user interface)
extending OnCompletionListener, 189
AbsoluteLayout, 78–82
implementing onCompletion method, 189
altering at runtime, 58–60
setting up for, 189–190
changing visibility of views, 61–65
view clicks, tracking, 62
creating views, 54–58
ViewGroup
customizing views, 65
dip value, 78
drawable folders, 76
dp value, 78
finding resources, 59
match_parent value, 78
identifying views, 58–59
px value, 78
layout folders, 74–76
using with layouts, 77–78
LinearLayout, 82–90
wrap_content value, 78
RelativeLayout, 90–96
views. See also custom views; extended views
resource folder, 71–73
assigning IDs, 58–59
values folder, 73–74
bringing in from XML files, 176
View class, 54
centering between objects, 95
ViewGroup, 77–78
changing visibility of, 61
USB debugging, enabling, 12
click listeners, 62
usernames, saving to preferences, 182
creating, 54–58
<uses> tag, 180
findViewByID, 58–60
uses-sdkfield, including, 242
GONE visibility setting, 61
identifying, 58–59
V INVISIBLE visibility setting, 61
keeping, 60
values folders
laying out, 75
arrays, 73
LinearLayouts, 130
colors, 74
OnClickListener, 62–65
contents of, 71
onCreate method, 63
creating, 74
retrieving, 59–60
dimensions, 74
setVisibility, 61
strings, 73
VISIBLE visibility setting, 61
styles, 74
wrapping in <merge> tag, 176
version, selecting for projects, 15
in XML, 54–55
versioning
views in Java, 56–58
versionCode field, 241
dip value, 57
versionName field, 241
dp value, 57
video player, creating, 188–190

256 INDEX
fill_parent value, 57 X
match_parent value, 57
XML (Extensible Markup Language)
px value, 57
setContentView method, 55
wrap_content value, 57
views in, 54–55
XML ﬁles
W bringing in views from, 176
websites packed binary format, 73
ActionBar documentation, 236 referencing resources in, 73
Android Developers, 4 XML versus Java layouts, 60
Eclipse IDE, 4
Z
Zipalign tool, accessing and using, 245

V413HAV INDEX 257

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