Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Development. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

'Tis the season for sharing (via your Android code)


Come Facebook, come Twitter, come Tumblr and Flickr!

No app is an island, we often want to be able to share the cool things we create with our apps with the world, whether it's the latest social network to on-sell our personal details, or just plain old email to your gran.



.. And here's how.

Lets say we have an image file located here:
String fileLocation = "/mnt/sdcard/SomeMediaFiles/aMediaFile10.jpg"

We can share this easily by passing the reference to our file location into the below method:
 
    public void shareFile(String newFilePath) {
      {Intent share = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);
      share.setType("image/jpeg"); 
 
//declare the MIME type of the file. .. What you pass into share.setType determines what apps appears in your Sharing list.

      Uri imageUri = Uri.fromFile(new File(newImagePath));
      share.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, imageUri);
   
      startActivity(Intent.createChooser(share, "Share"));
 }
}
And this is basically what is the result (actual apps listed will depend on what is installed on your users device):


... Easy.


Saturday, December 10, 2011

OutOfMemory errors when populating a Gallery


I've just spent the last couple of hours wrestling with OutOfMemory errors when populating a Gallery widget with photos, and as fun as it's been, I think I've sorted it out and thought I'd share my solution with you.

For starters, the reason we're getting OutOfMemory errors in the first place is that the heap size on Android devices is limited to something like 16 MB on a G1 and 24 MB on a Nexus one.

As soon as you start to work with media files you quickly start to learn that you need to work to manage your memory usage with Android as a result of this limitation.

I would also like to thank direct to device debugging, I couldn't have done this without utilizing it, I would go as far as saying that it is essential in situations like this.

Here is the full code of one of my imageAdapters,  I'm using this to provide the images to my Gallery widget like this:

galleryTop.setAdapter(new ImageAdapterTop(this));


The Adapter class :

public class ImageAdapterTop extends BaseAdapter {
   int mGalleryItemBackground;
   private Context mContext;


    File[] allTopSlices = Utils.getAllTopSlices();  
    String[] fullPathAllTopSlices = new String[allTopSlices.length];
    Uri[] uriAllTopSlices = new Uri[fullPathAllTopSlices.length];


   public ImageAdapterTop(Context c) {
       mContext = c;
       TypedArray a = obtainStyledAttributes(R.styleable.HelloGallery);
       mGalleryItemBackground = a.getResourceId(
               R.styleable.HelloGallery_android_galleryItemBackground, 0);
       a.recycle();
   }


   public int getCount() {
       return uriAllTopSlices.length;
   }


   public Object getItem(int position) {
       return position;
   }


   public long getItemId(int position) {
       return position;
   }


   public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
    int screenHeightPx = Utils.GetScreenHeight(getWindowManager().getDefaultDisplay());
   
    for(int i = 0; i < allTopSlices.length; i++){
    fullPathAllTopSlices[i] = allTopSlices[i].getAbsolutePath();
    }
   
    for(int j=0; j < fullPathAllTopSlices.length; j++){
    uriAllTopSlices[j] = Uri.parse(fullPathAllTopSlices[j]);
    }
   
       ImageView i = new ImageView(mContext);
     
       recycleDrawable(i);


       i.setImageBitmap(Utils.readBitmap(uriAllTopSlices[position].toString()));
     
       i.setLayoutParams(new Gallery.LayoutParams(400, (screenHeightPx-50) /3));
       i.setScaleType(ImageView.ScaleType.FIT_XY);      
       i.setBackgroundResource(mGalleryItemBackground);


       System.gc();
       return i;
     
   }
}



and the referenced recycleDrawable :

private void recycleDrawable(ImageView i) {
BitmapDrawable currentBitmapDrawable = (BitmapDrawable)i.getDrawable();

if(currentBitmapDrawable != null){
currentBitmapDrawable.getBitmap().recycle();        
}
        System.gc();
}



and readBitmap methods:

public static Bitmap readBitmap(String selectedImage) {
Bitmap bm = null;
BitmapFactory.Options options = new BitmapFactory.Options();
options.inSampleSize = 8;


try {
bm = BitmapFactory.decodeFile(selectedImage, options);
}
catch (OutOfMemoryError e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

return bm;
}

Probably worth mentioning that the 'options.inSampleSize' reference, which is downsizing the image is pretty much essential when working with large files with the memory constraints associated with current Android devices.

Hope that helps someone out there.


Monday, June 13, 2011

How to get the size and orientation of your device screen



Found this great snippet over at http://www.androidsnippets.com/ that allows you to find the size and orientation of the device screen at runtime, and thought I'd share it:

/* First, get the Display from the WindowManager */
Display display = ((WindowManager) getSystemService(WINDOW_SERVICE)).getDefaultDisplay();

/* Now we can retrieve all display-related infos */
int width = display.getWidth();
int height = display.getHeight();
int orientation = display.getOrientation();
// see http://androidsnippets.com/get-size-and-orientation-of-the-screen

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Creating a simple border with rounded corners for a layout or view

not the border in question..


Hi all, just thought I'd post this simple snippet that I've just found.
This allows you to simply add a border ( even with rounded corners!) to a layout or view.

All you need to do is create a new xml file somewhere in /res/drawable called 'the_border.xml'
with this or similar as the contents:

<shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"> 
    <stroke android:width="1dp" android:color="#FFFFFF" /> 
    <padding android:left="7dp" android:top="13dp" 
            android:right="7dp" android:bottom="17dp" /> 
    <corners android:radius="4dp" /> 
</shape> 

You can then reference this as the background of an item in your layout like this (in xml)

android:background="@drawable/the_border"

or like this in code:

llErrorMessage.setBackgroundResource(R.drawable.the_border);

Nice eh?

Sunday, February 13, 2011

TextView background is black when setting colour from xml?


I had a colour defined in a 'colours.xml' file in my project's 'values' folder like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <color name="tvBackground">#337700</color>
</resources>

Which, for those of you who cannot transpose directly from hex, looks like this:

My code looked like this:

   TextView tv = new TextView(getApplicationContext());
       
   tv.setBackgroundColor(R.color.tvBackground);

Seems reasonable doesn't it?

But when I ran my code, my shiny new little TextView came out with the background colour of this:


(that's #000000 in hex, or 'black' btw)

What was going on here?
Turns out, I wasn't using the correct method to set the background colour so that it comes out correctly, what I should have used was either of these:

   tv.setBackgroundResource(R.color.tvBackground);
- or -
   tv.setBackgroundColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.tvBackground));


.. Not especially well documented, but easily fixed.


Anyhow, now my TextView shows with the background colour of:


.. So all is now well with the world. Thought I'd just post this in case it helps someone out there (or myself when I forget next time)


until that next time, bye bye.


Monday, February 7, 2011

Wino the Wine Advisor now updated, new features & grrraphics


I've recently released an update for my Wino the Wine Advisor app,
The new version now allows you to combine tastes and also has some great new wine bottle graphics (even if I do say so myself).

Here are some screenshots:





.. And I have to say, those wine bottle images were an absolute pain to create.

I use Gimp and Inkscape to create all my graphics, in case you were wondering.




Sunday, January 23, 2011

How to get images dynamically


Lets say you're storing items in a slqite db for your new, soon-to-be-award-winning application, and one of the columns you're storing is the name of the image to associate with that item.

How on earth do you reference it from within your app so you can display it?
Good question! Here's how:


//first get a reference to the ImageView in our XML layout file we want to display the image in..

ImageView imgVw = (ImageView) customView.findViewById(R.id.imgVwInXML);

//Next check that there is actually an image file name in the db column:

if (OurDBCursor.getString(OurDBCursor.getColumnIndex("imageName")) != null) 
{
 
//if there is a name for the image, get that name..

  myImageName  = OurDBCursor.getString(OurDBCursor.getColumnIndex("imageName"));  
 

//get a reference to the image (located in our drawable folder in our project):
          
  int resID = getResources().getIdentifier("com.BlueMongo.Test:drawable/" + myImageName, null, null);  
 

//assign the resouce with that ID to our ImageView:
               
  imgVw.setImageResource(resID);
}

.. And that's it.

Hope that helps. Have a great day.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Google App Inventor: Android for Beginners for absolute beginners!

Today Google announced a simple-to-use DIY app maker called Google App Inventor.

Google App Inventor brings Android development to non-programmers, employing a design scheme that relies on visual blocks rather than writing pages of code, the App Inventor -- In true Google style, still in Beta, of course -- has functions for just about anything you can do with an Android handset, including access to GPS and phone functionality.

I can imagine this would be fantastic in classrooms.

more information here: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/
complete this form to apply for access: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/appinventorinterest/




Tre Cool!

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

How to tile a background image in Android


For one of the apps I'm working on I wanted to have a nice pixel pattern tiled behind my widgets.
After a little bit of hunting around I found this tutorial, and I thought I'd clean up the lessons within and show you how.

Here's the contents of my main.xml layout file,

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:orientation="vertical"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:background="@drawable/backrepeat"
    android:gravity="center_horizontal"
    >
<TextView  
    android:layout_width="fill_parent" 
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    android:text="@string/hello"
    />  
</LinearLayout>



which is referenced in code in the standard way like this:

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
...// (rest of onCreate method continues here..)

Now note this line:

android:background="@drawable/backrepeat"


What's going on there?
.. Glad you asked!

Here's a quick screenshot of the contents of one of my drawable folders in my project:


What is this
backrepeat.xml?

Well, here's the contents of that file here:

<bitmap
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:src="@drawable/scale1"
android:tileMode="repeat"
android:dither="true" />



Can you see what's going on?
Backrepeat.xml defines an instance of the BitmapDrawable class, and that class references our simple scale1.jpg, located in the drawable-hdpi folder.

Simply by adding the:

<bitmap
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:src="@drawable/scale1"
    android:tileMode="repeat"
    android:dither="true" />

line in bold, we are able to achieve results such as this:



Easy isn't it?

One thing to keep in mind is that you should have folders drawable-hdpi, drawable-mdpi & drawable-ldpi, you'll need to add this backrepeat.xml file and the relevant images to each of these to allow this functionality in high, medium and low dpi (dots per inch) screen sizes.

Enjoy.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Book Review: Professional Android 2 Application Development

Professional Android 2 Application Development (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Written by an Android authority, this up-to-date resource shows you how to leverage the features of Android 2 to enhance existing products or create innovative new ones.

Serving as a hands-on guide to building mobile apps using Android, the book walks you through a series of sample projects that introduces you to Android's new features and techniques.

It is perhaps one of the most in-depth Android books available, and is also very regularly updated, currently covering Android SDK 2.1 r1.


The Book's author, Reto Meier is a software developer who has been involved in Android since the initial release in 2007. He is an Android Developer Advocate at Google.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Some notes about Android Context



Context is an interface to global information about an application environment. It's an abstract class whose implementation is provided by the Android system.

Context allows access to application-specific resources and classes, as well as calls for application-level operations such as launching activities, broadcasting and receiving intents, etc.

All the widgets receive a Context parameter in their constructor. In a regular Android application, you usually have two kinds of Context, Activity and Application. It's usually an Activity Context that the developer passes to classes and methods that need a Context.

Basically the Application context is associated with the Application and will always be the same throughout the life cycle of your app, where as the Activity context is associated with the activity and could possible be destroyed many times as the activity is destroyed during screen orientation changes and such.

In particular you should be careful when dealing with anything that deals with the GUI that requires a Context. For example, if you pass the application Context into the LayoutInflator you will get an Exception. It's good practice to use an Activity's Context within that Activity, and the Application Context when passing a context beyond the scope of an Activity to avoid memory leaks.

Here's a quick snippet showing how you can find both the Activity Context and the Application Context:


public class MyActivity extends Activity {
public void aMethod() {
Context actContext = this; /*returns the Activity Context since Activity extends Context.*/

Context appContext = getApplicationContext(); /*returns the context of the single, global Application object of the current process. */

Button btnGoToFirstAct = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnGoToAct1);
Context vwContext = btnGoToFirstAct.getContext(); /*returns the context of the View. */



When run in the debugger, you can see the results of this:


 Notice that the vwContext in this case also returns the Activity Context.



Hope that helps answer some questions. Drop me a message in the comments if you have anything to add.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Learn what it takes to make a good Android app great.



Jason, John, and David, mobile industry veterans from Hands-On Mobile, present a technical overview of ways to improve your Android applications stickiness, boost adoption, engage users, and increase monetization and ROI.

This event was hosted by The San Francisco Android User Group at CBS Interactive in San Francisco on August 27th, 2009. The event was sponsored by Hands-On Mobile and organized by Marakana Inc.

Learn how to develop for Android, Beyond HelloWorld



This is a nice, long (2hrs) video, demonstrating many aspects of creating a simple Android application from scratch. Definitely worth checking out if you've got the time.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

How to Make your Android UI Fast and Efficient - video from Google I/O 2009 with Romain Guy


Here a video from Google I/O 2009 with Romain Guy from Google.

"Learn practical tips, techniques and tricks for making your Android applications fast and responsive. This session focussed on optimizations recommended by the Android framework team to make the best use of the UI toolkit."

.. Very interesting stuff. I would really encourage everyone to watch this.
Covers: Adapters, View & Layouts, Backgrounds & images, memory allocation and Drawing & invalidating.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Default text for an EditText? Here's a Hint



Sometimes it can be a nice idea to put default values in an EditText to let your users know what sort of information you're wanting them to enter.

What I had been doing previously was setting the .text value of the EditText to some default value, then clearing it onClick, after checking if the value was still the default, like this:

etName.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {


String name = etName.getText().toString();
String origVal = getResources().getText(R.string.NameDefault).toString();

@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
if(name.equals(origVal));
{
etName.setText("");

}

}
});


Here's my String resource, stored in res/strings.xml as used above:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>

<string name="NameDefault">Enter your name</string>
</resources>


But there is another, easier way, and it's called a Hint.

Simply by adding the below, bold attribute into my xml layout, my EditText by default contains a default string, which only exists when the EditText is empty.

It's all done for me!

.. here is my layout xml, note the android:hint line:

<EditText android:id="@+id/etName"
android:hint="@string/NameDefault"
android:minWidth="100dip"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_width="wrap_content">
</EditText>



Saturday, March 6, 2010

Handling Button clicks in a ListView Row


Lets say you have a spinner widget, like the one we created in our 'colours' example, and you wanted to put a button on each row of your spinner for your users to click (everyone loves clicking buttons, right?).

You might have a layout a bit like this simple one below:

<LinearLayout android:id="@+id/LinearLayout01"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

 <TextView android:text="this is a row"
     android:id="@+id/tvViewRow"
     android:layout_width="wrap_content"
     android:layout_height="wrap_content">
 </TextView>
 <Button android:text="Click me!"
     android:id="@+id/BtnToClick"
     android:layout_width="wrap_content"
     android:layout_height="wrap_content"
     android:onClick="myClickHandler">
 </Button>

</LinearLayout>

.. Containing just a textView and a Button View.

A listView with textual, non-clickable views in it responds to Click events via the OnItemClickListener event.

But once you put a button in the ListView, this event no longer fires.

So how do you capture the button's click event, and find what row in your ListView a clicked button is located in?

You may have noticed this android:onClick="myClickHandler"> in our layout above..
What this does is tie every click of every instance of that button, in every row of our ListView to one single handler, located in the code of our ListActivity class below:

    public void myClickHandler(View v) 
    {
          
        //reset all the listView items background colours 
        //before we set the clicked one..

        ListView lvItems = getListView();
        for (int i=0; i < lvItems.getChildCount(); i++) 
        {
            lvItems.getChildAt(i).setBackgroundColor(Color.BLUE);        
        }
        
        
        //get the row the clicked button is in
        LinearLayout vwParentRow = (LinearLayout)v.getParent();
         
        TextView child = (TextView)vwParentRow.getChildAt(0);
        Button btnChild = (Button)vwParentRow.getChildAt(1);
        btnChild.setText(child.getText());
        btnChild.setText("I've been clicked!");
        
        int c = Color.CYAN;
        
        vwParentRow.setBackgroundColor(c); 
        vwParentRow.refreshDrawableState();       
    }


In this case, the View v being passed in as a parameter is our button.
We get the parent of our button, being careful to cast it as a LinearLayout (have another look at the xml if you're not sure why), and then simply set the background colour of our Layout Row.

Don't forget to call .refreshDrawableState(); on your vwParentRow or it will never redraw and you won't see your nice colour change.

.. Tada!




Update: Hi everyone, thanks for all the interest, here's a link to the full project zipped.
Updated Update: Here's another link, and another, and another.

I've also updated the above myClickHandler to loop through the other items in the ListView and reset them to a default colour, in this case blue, to make it a bit more obvious what's going on. Hope that helps.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

How to create Status Bar Notifications


A status bar notification is used to notify the user of a system event, like an sms being received or a new device being detected, without interrupting the user from whatever other task they might be doing with their phone.

The status bar area is located at the top of the screen and the user can pull this area to expand it, and show a history of notifications.





If a Notification has been setup to include an enclosed Intent, selecting that particular notification in this expanded view can fire the Intent, taking the user to an Activity screen of the related application, or do any of the many other things that Intents can do.

You can also configure the notification to alert the user with a sound, a vibration, and flashing lights on the device.

A background Service should never launch an Activity on its own in order to receive user interaction. The Service should instead create a status bar notification that will launch the Activity when selected by the user.

A status bar notification should be used for any case in which a background Service needs to alert the user about an event.


Here is a simple method that creates and displays a notification when passed a string msg :


public void displayNotification(String msg)
{
NotificationManager manager = (NotificationManager) getSystemService(Context.NOTIFICATION_SERVICE);
Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, msg, System.currentTimeMillis());

// The PendingIntent will launch activity if the user selects this notification
PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, REQUEST_CODE, new Intent(this, ExpandNotification.class), 0);

notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, "Title here", ".. And here's some more details..", contentIntent);

manager.notify(NOTIFICATION_ID, notification);

}


.. Which you can call simply like this:


displayNotification("Hi, I'm a Statusbar Notification..");



.. Easy, isn't it?

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Want to display a quick message to your users? Use some Toast!



A toast is a notification view that contains a quick little message for the user. All it does is display the message, it's not interactive at all.

The toast class helps you create and show those.

When this view is shown to the user, it appears to float over the application. It will never receive focus as the user may be in the middle of typing something else. The idea is to be as unobtrusive as possible, while still showing the user the information you want them to see. Two possible examples are a volume control, and a brief message saying that your settings have been saved.

The easiest way to use this class is to call one of the static methods that constructs everything you need and returns a new Toast object.

A piece of toast is typically a simple text message, an image, or a combination of text and image.
You don't have control on the toast duration. There are only two states LENGTH_LONG and LENGTH_SHORT.

For this example we have added an image to one of the drawable folders under 'res' in our project, we refer to it simply like this:

view.setImageResource(R.drawable.flash);

Our image is actually called flash.png, note that we don't need to include the 'png' extension in our Android code, it already knows what we're talking about ;)

Here are 3 methods, demonstrating the above.

First, just show an image:

private void imageToast()
{
Toast toast = new Toast(getApplicationContext());
ImageView view = new ImageView(getApplicationContext());
view.setImageResource(R.drawable.flash);
toast.setView(view);
toast.show();
}


This method just displays a text toast:

public void textToast(String textToDisplay) {
Context context = getApplicationContext();
CharSequence text = textToDisplay;
int duration = Toast.LENGTH_SHORT;

Toast toast = Toast.makeText(context, text, duration);
toast.setGravity(Gravity.TOP|Gravity.LEFT, 50, 50);
toast.show();
}


.. And this method displays a Toast that contains both an image and text:

public void textAndImageToast(String textToDisplay)
{
Toast toast = Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), textToDisplay, Toast.LENGTH_LONG);
View textView = toast.getView();
LinearLayout lay = new LinearLayout(getApplicationContext());
lay.setOrientation(LinearLayout.HORIZONTAL);
ImageView view = new ImageView(getApplicationContext());
view.setImageResource(R.drawable.flash);
lay.addView(view);
lay.addView(textView);
toast.setView(lay);
toast.show();
}

You can call each of these like this:

textToast("This is a text toast");
        imageToast();

textAndImageToast("This is a text and image toast");


And here are the results:

A text Toast



A text & image Toast


this is an image Toast


Here is the same image Toast with default Gravity for better demonstration purposes


Hope that makes sense.
.. Till next time, happy coding :)


Monday, February 1, 2010

How to populate a Spinner widget from a database


Yesterday we saw how to populate a Spinner widget from an Array, and today, as promised, I'll show you how to populate a Spinner widget from a database.

This tutorial assumes that you're using the same code we used previously (link above), essentially the only differences are that we're using a different type of Adapter (a SimpleCursorAdapter this time) and populating it with the results of a query from a database table, and we're using a separate layout item to put our colour names


Here is our new layout, called db_view_row.xml:

<LinearLayout android:id="@+id/LinearLayout01"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="fill_parent"
xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

<TextView android:text=""
android:id="@+id/tvDBViewRow"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content">
</TextView>
</LinearLayout>


put this file in your res/layout directory in your project.


Let's assume for this example that you've already populated your database table with the same list of colours that we used previously.

Here's the statement to create our table structure:


CREATE TABLE "colours" (
"_id" INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL,
"colourName" TEXT NOT NULL
)




In our database adapter class we have a method called fetchAllColours(), which has the responsibility (probably no surprises here) of fetching all our colours ;).


At the top of our class we declare some static variables we're going to use :


public class TestDBAdapter {

public static final String KEY_TITLE = "colourName";
public static final String KEY_ROWID = "_id";

//..rest of class continues from here..



Here is this method also from our TestDBAdapter class:

public Cursor fetchAllColours()
{
if (mDb == null)
{
this.open();
}


/* here we check if our db exists as the connection might have been closed unexpectedly... and open it if it doesn't already exist*/


String tableName = "colours";

return mDb.query(tableName, new String[] { KEY_ROWID, KEY_TITLE}, null, null, null, null, null);

}



... which returns a database Cursor to our method below..


private void fillData() {
Cursor coloursCursor;
Spinner colourSpinner = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.my_colour_spinner);
coloursCursor = thisTestDBAdapter.fetchAllColours();

startManagingCursor(
coloursCursor);
/*Create an array to specify the fields we want to display in the list (only the 'colourName' column in this case) */

String[] from = new String[]{TestDBAdapter.KEY_TITLE};

/* and an array of the fields we want to bind those fields to (in this case just the textView 'tvDBViewRow' from our new
db_view_row.xml layout above) */

int[] to = new int[]{R.id.tvDBViewRow};

/*
Now create a simple cursor adapter.. */

SimpleCursorAdapter colourAdapter =
new SimpleCursorAdapter(this, R.layout.db_view_row,
coloursCursor, from, to);

/* and assign it to our Spinner widget */

colourSpinner.setAdapter(colourAdapter);
}





Update: Due to popular demand, here is a project that demonstrates this concept:
Spinner from Database example.


.. Let me know if you're having any access issues, it's just hosted publicly from my google docs.


I've learnt my lesson, I'm going to be including an example project with all future posts :)

Sunday, January 31, 2010

How to populate a Spinner widget from an Array

Lets say we have an Array of colours, defined in a xml file in our res folder in our Eclipse project, like below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<string name="hello">Hello World, droidTest1!</string>
<string name="app_name">droidTest1</string>

<string-array name="colours">
<item>Red</item>
<item>Blue</item>
<item>White</item>
<item>Yellow</item>
<item>Black</item>
<item>Green</item>
<item>Purple</item>
<item>Orange</item>
<item>Grey</item>
</string-array>
</resources>

Spinners are Android's implementation of a dropdown menu, of sorts.
How do we insert these values into a spinner widget?

First, we need to create a layout for our Spinner widget, so it has a user interface.
We could do this is code, but the more accepted method is to define our layouts for Android applications in XML files, located in our res/layout folder in our project.

<Spinner

android:id="@+id/my_colour_spinner"

android:layout_width="fill_parent"

android:layout_height="wrap_content"

android:drawSelectorOnTop="true”

/>




Then we create an instance of the Spinner class,

Spinner colourSpinner = (Spinner) findViewById(R.id.my_colour_spinner);



Next we create an ArrayAdapter to wrap our xml array (Array of colours) and we put some pre-defined styles.



ArrayAdapter adapter = ArrayAdapter.createFromResource( this, R.array.colors, android.R.layout.simple_spinner_item); adapter.setDropDownViewResource(android.R.layout.simple_spinner_dropdown_item);


And we set the ArrayAdapter to our instance of the Spinner class:
colourSpinner.setAdapter(adapter);


And when we run our application:

The closed Spinner Widget



.. When selected shows us out colour options.





Aaah.. Sweet Androidy Success!


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