Android fragments for beginners

Fragments have been introduced in Android with the Honeycomb milestone (aka Android 3.0). The main reason was to provide a flexible and powerful solution to deal with different kind of screens (i.e tablets and phone displays).

An activity layout is composed by one or more viewgroups, at the end, by simple views. Every view group is also called layout. An activity has one root layout, usually set with the setContentView(int resId) call.

If a layout is composed by many sublayouts/views, having all the UI code and the application logic code for the activity inside one class might quickly increase the complexity and lower the maintainability of the component.

A solution I've used in the past was to subclass the layout class and create a custom layout where I put all the UI code related to such layout. This approach has a drawback: a view group is not an activity. You've to put the app logic code inside the activity and consiquently to provide some sort of communication channel between the view and the activity when, for instance, you want to react to user actions (tap on a button, typing of a text). Components became tightly coupled and difficult to maintain/change.


With Honeycomb (but also in previous releases of the platform, thanks to the compatibility package), you can use fragments. These are like layouts but they have their own lifecycle, they have been created with the aim to contain both UI and app logic code, and can be used to provide an efficient way to deal with layouts that must be placed in different positions depending on the device the app is running on, or on the orientation of the device itself (portrait, landscape).




I've create a simple test project that shows how a layout can be created by different fragments that place themselves in a different way based on the orientation of the device.


The activity has provided a main layout for portrait and another for landscape. Fragments are placed in the LinearLayout in a different way depending on the orientation of the device:





The app logic that manages the fragment is inside the fragment itself:



As you can see, the fragment has framework methods that allow to save the current state. In the sample, a simple counter value is saved and if you change device orientation its valued isn't lost. As you can see, all the application logic pertaining the fragment is inside the fragment. The activity can handle other higher level tasks, such as fragment repositioning/move or orchestrating tasks affecting different portions of the UI.

The sample code can be found here:

https://github.com/nalitzis/SampleFragments