March 2011
Beginner
266 pages
6h 55m
English
Content preview from Learning AndroidBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 7. Preferences, the Filesystem, the Options Menu, and Intents
In this chapter, you will learn how to create preferences for your application, how the filesystem is organized, and how to use intents and the options menu to jump from one activity to another.
Preferences
Preferences are user-specific settings for an application. Preferences usually consist of some configuration data as well as a user interface to manipulate that data.
From the user interface point of view, preferences can be simple text values, checkboxes, selections from a pull-down menu, or similar items. From a data point of view, preferences are a collection of name-value pairs, also known as key-value or attribute-value pairs. The values are basic data types, such as integers, booleans, and strings.
Our micro-blogging application needs to connect to a specific server in the cloud using specific user account information. For that, Yamba needs to know the username and password for that account as well as the URL of the server it’s connecting to. This URL is also known as the API root. So, in our case, we’ll have three fields where the user can enter and edit his username, password, and the API root. This data will be stored as strings.
To enable our app to handle user-specific preferences, we need to build a screen to enter the information, Java code to validate and process that information, and some kind of mechanism to store this information.
All this sounds like a lot of work, but Android provides a framework ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.