I need a nice way to exchange data between two activities directly. I have one same custom title for all my running activities and in my first activity I display the GPS state in that title with an image (found/still searching). The LocationListener is in my first activity and if the GPS state changes, I would like to update all the titles of my running/displayed activities. At the moment I can only change the title of my first activity.
I know that I can exchange the data through the SharedPreferences and by Intents which passes the data as Extras but as far as I know, I can only receive the extras in the onCreate Methods of my other activities.
What I want do have is, that the data is updated on a still running activity (onCreate is passed).
I hope you understand what I mean :)
Example scenario:
I start up my App. The GPS localisation is running (first Activity). Meanwhile I navigate to another activity of my App. Now, If the GPS state changes I need to update the title of my second activity which is shown at the moment.
Is there any way to solve this problem?
Thanks
Apart from creating an activity with two fragments, there is a tricky way that serves for other scenarios :
Let's say, if you have an variable (let the text in the title bar is an variable) that needs to keep update, while it's impossible to use broadcast (message missing is not allowed or activity is killed), you can use the text saving from shared preference, and extract it every single time.
For example, Activity A uses String from sharepreference, key is "title", and default value is your app name. After B, C or D updates the title text, A also needs to update. So you just update the value of key "title" in share preference. After A is revoked, it will grasp the title in sharedPreference again and update the title accordingly.
Hope this help. :-)
Related
I have general questions about BottomNavigationView. I would like to have a BottomNavigationView in each of my Activities in an App for ordering something (e.g. food). It should have 4 buttoms:
Back
Info
Stats
My Orders
With 'Back' the app should just go back to the previous activity. The buttoms 'Stats' and 'My Orders' should switch to a persistent activity that should not be destroyed when not being displayed. 'My Orders' should display the last orders. The buttom 'Info' should only display some information about the current item or current menu (depending from which activity it is called). So basically I have 2 questions:
Should the Activities 'Info', 'Stats', and 'My Orders' be real Activities or just Fragments? Normally I think that at leat 'Stats', and 'My Orders' should be real Activities as they are persistent. But in many BottomNavigationView only Fragments are used?
How can I pass content information to the Activity/Fragment 'Info'. This Activity/Fragment should display information based on the Activity is was called from. Let's say the Activities are different dishes. Do I have to create a separate Info-Activity/Fragment for each dish? Or can I somehow define a dynamic Activity/Fragment that displayes information based on the current Activity?
I'd appreciate every comment and I'd really appreciate your help.
The recommended approach is Single Activity and Multiple fragments.
You can do this using Jetpack's Navigation Component
In case you need to pass data from an Activity/Fragment to the new calling Fragment, it can be done by setting arguments on the calling fragment and then getting it on the called fragment. If there is something which requires to be dynamic, for example- dishes fragment, make a single fragment and common layout and load the data dynamically from the backend.
For Setting Arguments, this should help
How to pass a variable from Activity to Fragment, and pass it back?
Note: You can use fragment without using Navigation Components but you have to use FragmentManager and FragmentTransaction and also have to maintain the Backstack by yourself which could be quite complicated
This may seem like a dumb question, but let's say I have an app where I have a multi-activity form:
Activity 1, 2, 3,..., n
At the bottom of activity 1 to 1-n, there is a "next" button which would ideally send the user-entered data to activity "n" and ALSO moves from activity "k" to activity "k+1" where "k < n".
In activity "n", there's a button which sends all the data from it's form and the previous forms to a database.
Do I need to pass data from activity to activity like a relay race or would I be able to directly pass data from activity "k" to the "n"th activity while also launching the "k+1"th activity? If the latter is possible, how would I do that?
FYI I'm sort of a newbie to Android dev as you can probably tell.
You dont need to pass it to each activity. You can just use a Shared Preference in each activities to save data, and finally in the Last Activity where you can fetch the data from Shared Preference and submit it to the database
Here is the example how it is done in Android
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/android/android_shared_preferences.htm
There are many other ways to achieve though. this would be a simple and basic one.
I'm a total beginner with Android and Eclipse and I have few questions that will help me understand the philosophy of Android:
The activity does all the work "behind the scenes". Activities are connected to a layout in the XML file. When the activity is started, if declared in setContentView method, the connected layout will be shown. Activity can be independent, without any layout, it can be invoked by another activity and will do all the work without showing any layout.
Activity is something like a php file which is invoked by my submit button in HTML, and the layout is .HTML which shows elements.
Am I right with this one?
For example, if I want to change the layout of my app, I want to show Layout2.xml when clicking button in Layout1.xml. Then I have to destroy the activity which is connected with Layout1.xml and start the activity which is connected with Layout2.xml? Is this correct? Is there any better way to do this?
How can I (by which method) destroy/stop a certain activity?
Thank you in an advance.
The best bet is to read the Android documentation regarding activites at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html
I will answer your specific questions here though
An Activity is a window that the user can see (or a hidden window if there is no layout defined). It deals with the logic of a part of the app that the user can see and interact with. If we take the MVC model (Model View Controller), the Activity is the controller, in terms of it controls which data from the Model is shown on the View (the xml layout).
If you want to show a new window/screen/activity you do not need to destroy the current one. You can open a new activity whilst keeping the old one in the background (in the back stack). With the use of fragments, you can have multiple fragments in an activity so rather than changing activities, you can change fragments in a single activity. For more information about fragments take a look at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Fragment.html.
This point relies heavily on the activity lifecycle. When an activity is destroyed, it means it is finishing and this can be done by the user pressing the back button whilst on the activity, the activity calling finish() on itself or by the Android operating system destroying the activity because memory is required elsewhere (this can happen when the app is in the background).
When we say an activity is stopped, it means that the activity is no longer visible to the user. This can be the case where the activity is in the back stack (another activity is in front of it) or if the app has been put into the background.
This is a brief answer to your questions but I highly recommend you read the Android documentation to gain better knowledge.
I'm developing a chat app, but I have a problem.
I've a list with the contacts and when I select one contact I'm starting a new activity
Intent i = new Intent(this, MessageScreen.class);
startActivity(i);
but, when I choose another contact to talk I will use the same activity.
but it always open with the last contact screen and the variables still with the old values.
I would like to make something similar to google talk, where you can start to talk with another contact, and all the messages use the same screen, and you can change between the chats fast with no need to reconstruct the screen, reload the messages, etc..
Anyone have any idea of how to implement this?
Sliding between activities isn't a common feature, it sounds like there is one second activity that has a ViewPager that is populated with multiple chats. When starting this activity, they're probably adding the Reorder to front flag to the intent and have overridden onNewIntent to add a new view to the pager.
Try something like*:
i.PutExtra ("key", value);
before starting the activity (e.g. store the user name) and then read your value from the activity and adjust (e.g. UI) it based on the value
note: syntax could differ a bit since I do my Android stuff from C#
I understand how to save an application's state by using SharedPreferences, onSavedInstanceState() & onRestoreInstanceState(), etc as outlined in a similar post ( Saving Android Activity state using Save Instance State ), but how do I save the last activity?
To be more specific, my application starts up and goes to a login screen. Once a user logs in and navigates through several activities, lets say he or she leaves the app using the home button or in some other way. Next time the user starts the app, it will go back to the login screen and do a login again. Instead, I want the app to start up and go to the last activity that was on top of the stack when the user left the app in the previous session.
How is the last activity saved so that it can be restored on app startup?
I believe Android does this automatically. We have an app that we are working on. When I click the home button and them come back to the app, it starts in the activity where I left off. We have not written any code to make this happen. It just seems to work.
My colleague has written an article on Android application state including details on getLastNonConfigurationInstance() which retrieves the instance that was last stored. Take a look here: http://www.eigo.co.uk/Managing-State-in-an-Android-Activity.aspx
Please note that the above answer is correct only on one case: If your process does not get killed by android because the resources (memory, ...) are needed for a different reason.
To get what you describe, I would write a custom parent activity and override the correct life-cycle methods to store your application state and read it and act accordingly. Then let all your activities inherit from MyActivity (instead of android.app.Activity)
public MyActivity extends android.app.Activity {
...
#Override
public onCreate(...) {
// Read the Application state,
// check if the currently launching Activity is the right one,
// if not, start the last Activity and finish the current one.
}
#Override
public onDestroy(...) {
// Store the current Activity ID in the SharedPreferences
}
...
}
Take care to call the super.onDestroy and super.onCreate methods in all your Activites (like you should do anyways).
Happy coding and have fun with Android!