When you create for instance a new Activity in Eclipse, the new class is added with a small bit of code inside it - in the case of an Activity an almost empty onCreate method and related imports. I was wondering if there was a way to change the default templates for Activity, Service and some more, to make some of it easier. Basically adding all the lifecycle methods, and maybe even some custom things I always use.
But I can't seem to find out where Eclipse gets that info from? Could someone point me in the right direction?
PS. Didn't know whether to put this in General or Software Development, but since I still get the thread of being banned every time I consider posting in SD, I chose General ;-)
Hi all
I am developing an app in which I would like to allow user-generated content. Specifically, this will be a remote control application, and I would like people to be able to add custom layouts, capable of sending "events" through the app, but I am not sure how to do so.
There are a couple of ways I have been looking at. The first is using a WebView so that this content can be developed in HTML. This would be nice and easy from their point of view, but it does have it's downsides, especially where security is concerned. If I was to do this, I would want to bind a "send" Javascript interface to my app, but disallow any other Javascript (I do not, for example, want it to be able to relay the button presses to some other place). I'm not sure exactly how I could do this.
The second way I can see would be to use an XML file and build up the layout from that. Here, the only way I could see it to parse the XML file and programatically build the layout. This seems a lot of work, and I would rather avoid that.
A third way would be to import a layout purely as an image plus an XML file describing hot-spots for triggering events. This seems to have too many limitations.
The final option is to expose an interface to other apps, and allow users to build separate applications which hook in to provide these layouts. This seems a terrible approach for such a simple objective.
So, does anyone know of a simple way to do what I am after, or any comments on the options listed above? Has anyone done anything similar, or know of an open-source project which acheives something similar?
Thanks in advance
Hey guys,
I'm really new to this app development and would like to ask one of you experienced developers a question.
Basically I have recently been creating mobile websites from a set of css files which are just a basic template. The template files have individual files for some of the most common pages that a small business would need, google map, contact us with form, menu, opening hours and so on.
What happens is you simply upload the company logo and such into the images folder, update the css style sheet for colours, then simply edit one of the relevant pages e.g place the food items in the menu page.
When the whole set of files gets uploaded it creates a personalised functional business mobile website.
What I would like to know is, would it be possible to set something like this up for an android app? Whereby the user could simply change the details as above and then compile the apk file which will create the app?
Your input is much appreciated, also have any of you got any idea where I could get someone to code something like this?
Regards,
Stephen
If I wanted to make a free app that I use on a daily basis easier to use, just by simply adding an extra tab to a page that already has two. could I simply decompile the .apk and find the code within the UI for this activity, couldn't I simply copy the code used to add the second tab to make the third, and just go in and edit the specifics ie. text, id, etc. there is another activity within the app that uses three tabs, so as long as it looks identical to that (other than specific identifiers) then this activity should work once edited, correct? I know that specific things such as label id's etc need to be specific to this tab. I have done a little bit of app development, but not lots, as UI is what I really am not great at. Thanks in advance for the help.
anyone?
any help at all?
Hello.
I followed all the New Boston Android videos, did everything, understood everything.
I tried to create a basic RSS feed reader, in order to better incorporate some concepts I learned in the New Boston videos (http processing, xml processing, adapting the content to lists, custom lists, etc). When I got to pass the information from the http processed data to xml parser and the list, that's when I got too much confused and knew I didn't have enough knowledge.
Then I tried to do some "Shopping List Manager" (just like OI Shopping, a bit adapted more to my taste), in order to learn.
However, again, when I neededto pass information to other objects in other classes or something like that, I get confused and don't know what to do.
So I bought CommonsWare book, "The Busy Coder's Guide to Android", which I have the latest version (5.1) and I'm reading, but I don't like to advance when I don't fully understand something. This time I'm stuck on the Action Bar part, more precisely this one:
Code:
private void configureActionItem(Menu menu) {
EditText add=
(EditText)menu.findItem(R.id.add).getActionView()
.findViewById(R.id.title);
add.setOnEditorActionListener(this);
}
I know this will seem very basic to many of you, but I get really confused on all this calls, returning results and more calls.
I don't have a background on OOP, except when I worked with PHP frameworks like Symfony, I work usually with direct task programming (scripting, automation, etc), as I am a Linux System Administrator, so my code is mainly scripting and web interface building (Python, Shell Script, PHP, Javascript, etc).
Can anybody explain what can I do to better understand this? It's just lack of practice and in time I'll understand better? Is it OOP lack of knowledge/practice? Or is it Java lack of knowledge/practice?
Thanks a lot for all your help.
Maybe the best approach is to get some face time with a person who is more experienced and have him explain to you the concept you have trouble with while focusing on the parts you don't grasp. A real human has this flexibility to do a "targeted strike" unlike a tutorial or a book that has no idea where in particular the student may get confused.
For this particular issue, the issue can be summarized as follows. Let's say you have an object call a function:
Code:
orange.peel();
This should be relatively straightforward. The next level of complexity is the fact that obj is just a variable representing an object, and in fact we can substitute anything else that evaluates to an object (i.e.: after it runs, you end up with an object). For example these all are legal ways to call the method as long as types match:
Code:
(new Orange()).peel();
(shouldEatSmallerOrange ? smallerOrange : largerOrange).peel();
retrieveOrangeFromBox().peel();
The last line illustrates calling some other function that returns the object, which is then used to call a second function. The final step from here is to recognize that instead of a single retrieveOrangeFromBox() we can have a chain of functions, each of which returns an object that is used to call the next function in line. For example:
Code:
findCar().accessCarTrunk().unloadBoxFromTrunk().retrieveOrangeFromBox().peel();
The names are unnecessarily verbose to illustrate how functions and their results relate to each other.
OOP + Android system
You're not that clear as to exactly what you are having a problem with, but in general, it sounds like you need to get a java book and learn the basic concepts of classes and interfaces. Since you say you have a background in PHP you could probably go pretty far just by following the Java tutorials on the Sun website. I say java because that's the target language here, any book on OOP in any language would be adequate but learning java would give you the added ability to read other people's android code examples more easily.
After that, you can learn the Android framework. You develop in the Java language but you work within the android framework. What that means is that here, for example, the action bar is provided to you by the android system, and this callback is called by the system, so it is all set up for you. But to understand what is happening, you need to understand when the system calls this method and what it does. That is the framework.
So more specifically, how can you understand this code? This method is called from another method, onCreateOptionsMenu(). OnCreateOptionsMenu() is a method in the Activity class that is called automatically by the system at a specific time. You need to read about the Activity class and the Activity lifecycle on the android developers site. If you want your activity to provide an options menu, you create it in OnCreateOptionsMenu and return it, the system will handle it from there. So back to configureActionItem(Menu menu), here you are passing in the menu object, which contains MenuItem objects, which the system uses to populate the menu (either on the action bar, or when you hit the menu button, depending on the android version). Each MenuItem object has a view that is associated with it (usually created in an XML file).
One thing that may be hard to understand is that all these calls are chained, so if you don't know what they are returning you don't know where to look for help. It's easier if you separate the calls out. Here, the documentation is your friend. If you look at the Menu class on the android dev site, you see that findItem() returns a MenuItem. So then you look up MenuItem, and you see that getActionView() returns a View. Look at the View class, and you can see findViewById() returns another view (a sub-view that is contained within this view). so when you look at it all together, unchained:
Code:
private void configureActionItem(Menu menu) {
MenuItem mi = menu.findItem(R.id.add);
View parentView = mi.getActionView();
EditText add = (EditText)parentView.findViewById(R.id.title);
}
findViewById returns a View, but you know that the view known by the id R.id.title is an EditText view, and you want to use it as an EditText, so you have to cast the View to an EditText (which is a subclass of View) so that the compiler knows that it is an EditText type of view. That's what the (EditText) is doing in front of the findViewById call. To understand that you need to read about subclassing and strongly-typed programming languages. PHP is weakly-typed, so that might be new to you.
finally, you call setOnEditActionListener on the EditText. OnEditActionListener is an interface that you have implemented in this class. An interface defines a common set of methods that are guaranteed to be present in whichever class has implemented it. So when you set the OnEditActionListener to this, (this means the current instance of this class), the EditText will hold on to the "this" object and it knows that it can call a certain set of methods on it. What are those methods? look up the OnEditActionListener interface in the docs:
it only has one method,
Code:
public abstract boolean onEditorAction (TextView v, int actionId, KeyEvent event);
so somewhere in this class, you will have this method defined and this is where you put code that you want to run when the EditText triggers this action. I assume this get called when the user touches the EditText.
It's really not going to be easy to work with android if you don't have a basic knowledge of OOP, specifically classes, inheritance, and interfaces. Also, knowing how java implements these concepts will help a lot. Then you can use your book to learn the Android framework.
GreenTuxer said:
Hello.
I followed all the New Boston Android videos, did everything, understood everything.
I tried to create a basic RSS feed reader, in order to better incorporate some concepts I learned in the New Boston videos (http processing, xml processing, adapting the content to lists, custom lists, etc). When I got to pass the information from the http processed data to xml parser and the list, that's when I got too much confused and knew I didn't have enough knowledge.
Then I tried to do some "Shopping List Manager" (just like OI Shopping, a bit adapted more to my taste), in order to learn.
However, again, when I neededto pass information to other objects in other classes or something like that, I get confused and don't know what to do.
So I bought CommonsWare book, "The Busy Coder's Guide to Android", which I have the latest version (5.1) and I'm reading, but I don't like to advance when I don't fully understand something. This time I'm stuck on the Action Bar part, more precisely this one:
Code:
private void configureActionItem(Menu menu) {
EditText add=
(EditText)menu.findItem(R.id.add).getActionView()
.findViewById(R.id.title);
add.setOnEditorActionListener(this);
}
I know this will seem very basic to many of you, but I get really confused on all this calls, returning results and more calls.
I don't have a background on OOP, except when I worked with PHP frameworks like Symfony, I work usually with direct task programming (scripting, automation, etc), as I am a Linux System Administrator, so my code is mainly scripting and web interface building (Python, Shell Script, PHP, Javascript, etc).
Can anybody explain what can I do to better understand this? It's just lack of practice and in time I'll understand better? Is it OOP lack of knowledge/practice? Or is it Java lack of knowledge/practice?
Thanks a lot for all your help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot for your help. I also think my issue is with OOP, but I needed the opinion of people with more knowledge.
I understand very well what you said about onCreateOptionsMenu(), why and when is called, Activity class, lifecycle, etc.
Those things I understand without any problem. I also understand the basics of OOP, but I don't know almost nothing about Interfaces and I don't have almost any experience with inheritance, although I understand it.
I think I'm just confused because I haven't worked very long with OOP. I just don't know if I should invest in something like reading and testing something like Thinking in Java, or just practice more and more Android Development.