How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin.

By Alex Forrester , Eran Boudjnah , Alexandru Dumbravan and 1 more
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    2. Building User Screen Flows
About this book
Are you keen to get started building Android 11 apps, but don’t know where to start? How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin is a comprehensive guide that will help kick-start your Android development practice. This book starts with the fundamentals of app development, enabling you to utilize Android Studio and Kotlin to get started building Android projects. You'll learn how to create apps and run them on virtual devices through guided exercises. Progressing through the chapters, you'll delve into Android’s RecyclerView to make the most of lists, images, and maps, and see how to fetch data from a web service. Moving ahead, you'll get to grips with testing, learn how to keep your architecture clean, understand how to persist data, and gain basic knowledge of the dependency injection pattern. Finally, you'll see how to publish your apps on the Google Play store. You'll work on realistic projects that are split up into bitesize exercises and activities, allowing you to challenge yourself in an enjoyable and attainable way. You'll build apps to create quizzes, read news articles, check weather reports, store recipes, retrieve movie information, and remind you where you parked your car. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills and confidence to build your own creative Android applications using Kotlin.
Publication date:
February 2021
Publisher
Packt
Pages
794
ISBN
9781838984113

 

2. Building User Screen Flows

Overview

This chapter covers the Android activity lifecycle and explains how the Android system interacts with your app. By the end of this chapter, you'll have learned how to build user journeys through different screens. You'll also be able to use activity tasks and launch modes, save and restore the state of your activity, use logs to report on your application, and share data between screens.

 

Introduction

The previous chapter introduced you to the core elements of Android development, from configuring your app using the AndroidManifest.xml file, working with simple activities, and the Android resource structure, to building an app with build.gradle and running an app on a virtual device. In this chapter, you'll go further and learn how the Android system interacts with your app through the Android lifecycle, how you are notified of changes to your app's state, and how you can use the Android lifecycle to respond to these changes. You'll then progress to learning how to create user journeys through your app and how to share data between screens. You'll be introduced to different techniques to achieve these goals so that you'll be able to use them in your own apps and recognize them when you see them used in other apps.

 

The Activity Lifecycle

In the previous chapter, we used the onCreate(saveInstanceState: Bundle?) method to display a layout in the UI of our screen. Now, we'll explore in more detail how the Android system interacts with your application to make this happen. As soon as an Activity is launched, it goes through a series of steps to take it through initialization and preparing it to be displayed to being partially displayed, and then fully displayed. There are also steps that correspond with your application being hidden, backgrounded, and then destroyed. This process is called the Activity lifecycle. For every one of these steps, there is a callback that your Activity can use to perform actions such as creating and changing the display and saving data when your app has been put into the background and then restoring that data after your app comes back into the foreground. You can consider these callbacks as hooks into how the system interacts with your activity/screen.

Every...

 

Saving and Restoring the Activity State

In this section, you'll explore how your Activity saves and restores the state. As you've learned in the previous section, configuration changes, such as rotating the phone, cause the Activity to be recreated. This can also happen if the system has to kill your app in order to free up memory. In these scenarios, it is important to preserve the state of the Activity and then restore it. In the next two exercises, you'll work through an example ensuring that the user's data is restored when TextView is created and populated from a user's data after filling in a form.

Exercise 2.02: Saving and Restoring the State in Layouts

In this exercise, firstly create an application called Save and Restore with an empty activity. The app you are going to create will have a simple form that offers a discount code for a user's favorite restaurant if they enter some personal details (no actual information will be sent anywhere...

 

Activity Interaction with Intents

An intent in Android is a communication mechanism between components. Within your own app, a lot of the time, you will want another specific Activity to start when some action happens in the current activity. Specifying exactly which Activity will start is called an explicit intent. On other occasions, you will want to get access to a system component, such as the camera. As you can't access these components directly, you will have to send an intent, which the system resolves in order to open the camera. These are called implicit intents. An intent filter has to be set up in order to register to respond to these events. Go to the AndroidManifest.xml file and you will see an example of two intent filters set within the <intent-filter> XML element:

<activity android:name=".MainActivity">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent...
 

Intents, Tasks, and Launch Modes

Up until now, you have been using the standard behavior for creating Activities and moving from one Activity to the next. The flow you have been using is the default, and in most cases, this will be the one you choose to use. When you open the app from the launcher with the default behavior, it creates its own Task, and each Activity you create is added to a back stack, so when you open three Activities one after the other as part of your user's journey, pressing the back button three times will move the user back through the previous screens/Activities and then go back to the device's home screen, while still keeping the app open.

The launch mode for this type of Activity is called Standard; it is the default and doesn't need specifying in the Activity element of AndroidManifest.xml. Even if you launch the same Activity three times, one after the other, there will be three instances of the same activity that exhibit the behavior described...

 

Summary

In this chapter, you have covered a lot of the groundwork of how your application interacts with the Android framework, from the Activity lifecycle callbacks to retaining the state in your activities, navigating from one screen to another, and how intents and launch modes make this happen. These are core concepts that you need to understand in order to move on to more advanced topics.

In the next chapter, you will be introduced to fragments and how they fit into the architecture of your application, as well as exploring more of the Android resources framework.

About the Authors
  • Alex Forrester

    Alex Forrester is an experienced software developer with more than 20 years of experience in mobile, web development, and content management systems. He has been working with Android for over 8 years, creating flagship apps for blue-chip companies across a broad range of industries at Sky, The Automobile Association, HSBC, The Discovery Channel, and O2. Alex lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and daughter. When he’s not developing, he likes rugby and running in the Chiltern hills.

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  • Eran Boudjnah

    Eran Boudjnah is a developer with over 20 years of experience in developing desktop applications, websites, interactive attractions, and mobile applications. He has been working with Android for about 7 years, developing apps and leading mobile teams for a wide range of clients, from start-ups (JustEat) to large-scale companies (Sky) and conglomerates. He is passionate about board games (with a modest collection of a few hundred games) and has a Transformers collection he’s quite proud of. Eran lives in North London with Lea, his wife.

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  • Alexandru Dumbravan

    Alexandru Dumbravan has been an Android Developer since 2011 and worked across a variety of Android applications which contained features such as messaging, voice calls, file management, and location. He continues to broaden his development skills while working in London for a popular fintech company.

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  • Jomar Tigcal

    Jomar Tigcal is an Android developer with over 10 years of experience in mobile and software development. He worked on various stages of app development for small startups to large companies. Jomar has also given talks and conducted training and workshops on Android. In his free time, he likes running and reading. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife Celine.

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How to Build Android Apps with Kotlin.
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