Friday, September 20, 2013

Android: ExpandableListView using CursorTreeAdapter with in fragment, Content Provider, LoaderCallbacks and CursorLoader



Sample application using Single-pane and Multi-pane Layouts with ExpandableListView using CursorTreeAdapter with in fragment, Content Provider, LoaderCallbacks & CursorLoader.

MULTI-PANE LAYOUTS
On a tablet, you want to take advantage of all the space. Get rid of line lengths that stretch the whole screen. Multi-pane layouts allow you to resolve than. Panes should represent content in an ordered manner; from left-to-right... content becomes more detailed.

Rule is to maintain functional parity in all screen orientations. We have a few strategies to solve this. You can use all or some. You can either: stretch, stack, expand/collapse, or show/ hide different UI panes, depending on the screen orientation. Some figures demonstrate these designs.

Implementation should be done with Fragments. A fragment is "a fragment of an activity". It's a unit that can be reused across activities. It's something smaller than an activity that shares lifecycle patterns, but is focused on a sub-layout that's separated in your codebase.


Ref: AndroidUIs





Figure: Implementing Android UI's for Handset and Tablets
 


On a tablet-sized screen, the Activity A layout contains both Fragment A and Fragment B.
On a handset-sized screen, the Activity A layout contains only Fragment A (the list view). In order to show the details in Fragment B, Activity B must open.

In Expandable List, Child Query is fetched from CursorLoader, We may get doubt, Why we should go for Cursor Loader and what are their adv.?

A CursorLoader automatically re-runs the query when data associated with the query changes. It runs an asynchronous query in the background against a ContentProvider, and returns the results to the Activity or FragmentActivity from which it was called. This allows the Activity or FragmentActivity to continue to interact with the user while the query is ongoing.

Loading Data in the Background

Querying a ContentProvider for data you want to display takes time. If you run the query directly from an Activity, it may get blocked and cause the system to issue an "Application Not Responding" message. Even if it doesn't, users will see an annoying delay in the UI. To avoid these problems, you should initiate a query on a separate thread, wait for it to finish, and then display the results.
You can do this in a straightforward way by using an object that runs a query asynchronously in the background and reconnects to your Activity when it's finished. This object is aCursorLoader. Besides doing the initial background query, aCursorLoader automatically re-runs the query when data associated with the query changes.
This class describes how to use a CursorLoader to run a background query. Examples in this class use the v4 Support Library versions of classes, which support platforms starting with Android 1.6.

Running a Query with a CursorLoader

A CursorLoader runs an asynchronous query in the background against a ContentProvider, and returns the results to the Activity or FragmentActivity from which it was called.

Source Code: Here

Thanks for reading :)
If you have any other quick thoughts/hints that you think people will find useful, feel free to leave a comment.

2 comments :

  1. Very Nice Post, it helped a lot and it worked by himself, but im trying to implement the expandablelistview in only one fragment, in a proyect with 3 fragments, i mean, i want all of this, but only in one part of my app, i cant transpase this from the main activity to my fragment1.java

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