Droidin' out tips and tricks from an android expert

++dave;: Cucumber for Android!

Very useful post that's helping us probe the mysteries of android + cucumber.

++dave;: Cucumber for Android!.

How to control orientation changes for fragments in a FragmentActivity with multiple fragments

I wasted several hours trying to fix this problem so once again i'm paying it forward in the hope it's helpful to someone else.

The problem is that it's difficult to control configuration changes in a fragment activity with multiple fragments when you need fragments to behave differently.

Here is my scenario:
I have a fragment activity that displays different fragments one at a time. The first fragment displayed is not allowed to change orientation, it must be locked in portrait.
However the next fragment I show in the same activity needs to be able to change on both portrait and landscape orientations.

Sure I could have just rewritten my code to have the other fragment start in a different activity but that's besides the point.

Anyway, what you have to do is make sure you can get configuration changes

Manifest code:

Activity code:

//
//
	@Override
	public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig) {

		if(fragment!=null && fragment.isResumed()){
			//do nothing here if we're showing the fragment
		}else{
			setRequestedOrientation(Configuration.ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT); // otherwise lock in portrait
		}
		super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);
	}

The code above doesn't work by itself. You would think so but there's a problem where you never receive more onConfigurationChanged callbacks after you call setRequestedOrientation.

Luckily we can take advantage of the lifecycle of our fragment to help our activity get out of it's funk.
When our fragment resumes we can do the following:

Fragment code:

//
//
@Override
	public void onResume() {
		getActivity().setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_FULL_SENSOR);
..}

I also make sure that my activity goes back to portrait mode if I exit this fragment.

//
//
	@Override
	public void onPause() {
		getActivity().setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT); // set the activity back to //whatever it needs to be when going back.
		super.onPause();
	}

This ensures that the activity can go back to being stubborn about orientation changes while letting an individual fragment take over configuration changes while it's active.
I hope this is helpful! cheers!

More on testing automation in Android

Test automation has been a particularly interesting topic for me in the past few weeks. I wanted to share some of the info I've gathered hoping that it will be useful to someone else. In my previous post I talked about Testdroid which makes use of robotium and also can make MonkeyRunner tests The plugin provided by Testdroid is essentially a way to record and script UI events.
It will generate test cases for you where you can then go in and add assertions. It's pretty neat.

Now i'd like to talk a little bit about Robolectric. Robolectric is created and maintained by folks at Pivotal labs. Robolectric runs within your VM which makes it very cool.
This means you don't need the emulator to run tests. That's pretty cool! I definitely recommend giving this a try. I'm going to deep dive into Robolectric to use on my current personal project.
I'll post some of those results later.

Testdroid – a great test solution for Testing Automation in Android

Because of fragmentation in Android it is very important to test you apps in as many devices as you can get your hands on. You've heard it all before right?

So have I. Testing mobile apps still remains quite a daunting task. For larger projects such as the one I'm currently working on Test Automation becomes a necessity very quickly. It is simply too time consuming, error prone and difficult to test manually. So what can you do? What tools are available to help you automate UI testing?

Luckily, Android comes to the rescue. Android's testing framework is top notch and easy to work with. They make life worth living.

Android's testing toolset is based on JUnit and is very well integrated for android projects into Eclipse. Android instrumentation provides a way to hook into android components and load applications.

The testing framework also provides a way to create Mock objects to help you isolate parts of your application for specific tests.

You also get the monkeyrunner tool, a python framework for executing android apps.

All in all you get a very powerful set of tools that can enable you to produce detailed and efficient testing solutions.

But wait! there's more! Since of course this framework is so great, there are developers building great testing solutions based on these tools. One that i'm starting to dig into is robotium. Robotium is a test framework  aimed at test case developers to write function, system and acceptance tests scenarios for apps.

Adding yet more value to this are companies like bitbar who provide a plugin for Eclipse called testdroid which makes recording a UI test of your app, child's play. Very cool and worth checking out!

And AA steps it up a notch