Android Client GSoC 2016 Project Ideas

[shivtej (Shivang Nagaria)]

@r0bby, @raff. I have updated my proposal, added some relevant mockups, updated the timeline and made the implementation more detailed. Please review. Thanks

[shivtej (Shivang Nagaria)]

I want to discuss about the one of the project objective Support for custom form. From all the details I got , I understood that the objective is to make form by interpreting the html response we get from server.(response can be different hence the implementation should be generic).

Correct me, if I’m wrong. Please also provide some details.

Thanks

[r0bby (Robby O'Connor)]

@shivtej

want to discuss about the one of the project objective Support for custom form.From all the details I got , I understood that the objective is to make form by interpreting the html response we get from server.(response can be different hence the implementation should be generic).

REST API gives you JSON. We’re not parsing HTML at all. You’d serialize the form schema in some sane way and then parse that and generate the form widgets accordingly.

[avijitghosh82 (Avijit Ghosh)]

Here are some mockups which are a part of my proposed design overhaul:

@r0bby @raff and others, your suggestions are welcome!

[r0bby (Robby O'Connor)]

They are pretty slick!

[brainbreaker (Gautam Prajapati)]

Hi All,

I have few ideas to improve the performance and UI/UX Android Client. I would like to discuss them.

1. The application currently uses the ListView for displaying any kind of list. I would suggest upgrading to RecyclerView. By using RecyclerView we can have an edge over traditional list views.

   • It improves the performance and is highly customizable

   • We can animate the items easily using its RecyclerView.ItemAnimator class

   • We can easily apply borders and margins at the run time using RecyclerView.ItemDecorator class.

   • For example, we have a list of past and current visits of a patient in Patient Dashboard, we can provide actions to end and start visit there itself with cool animations. it will save us from the overhead of opening a new activity or fragment.

2. Another one for UI improvement, we can use cards as list items, and creating a list of cards using RecyclerView will be good in terms of performance and layout designs. Awesome looks can be given to UI using card views.

I would like to work on these features as a ‘New Feature’ over the community bonding period. Any suggestions or tips? @r0bby, @raff, @avijitghosh82 and other viewers?

[avijitghosh82 (Avijit Ghosh)]

Interesting that as you were typing this I added some enhancement to the card layouts I had added long time back:

AC-165 Added card backgrounds to listviews and added onpress color

As for Recyclerview, the only obvious benefit I see are animations. Since we aren’t using anything other than vertical listviews, will it not be better to look at animation implementations using ListView? The additional coding overhead for the Recyclerview, combining with its tendency to recycle UI items (thereby being more prone to crashes) is a slightly riskier tradeoff, don’t you think?

[brainbreaker (Gautam Prajapati)]

@avijitghosh82

Since we aren’t using anything other than vertical listviews, will it not be better to look at animation implementations using ListView?

As per the official documentation animations for adding and removing items are enabled by default in RecyclerView. For more customization we just need to define our own animations and the default RecyclerView.ItemAnimator class’ method RecyclerView.setItemAnimator() can be used. For reference check this library. It is going to be easier than adding animations in a ListView.[quote=“avijitghosh82, post:28, topic:4903”] The additional coding overhead for the recycler view, combining with its tendency to recycle UI items (thereby being more prone to crashes) is a slightly riskier tradeoff, don’t you think? [/quote]

All the adapters in the project are already using ViewHolder pattern to recycle views. I don’t see crashes in the app :). In a ListView its an optional practice but we have adopted that. In recycler view, it is mandatory that you use View Holders.

Also, in the case of long lists recycler view is more efficient. Overheads as far as I can see is to change the binding method in the adapter and listview tags in the layout files. This will give us more customization power.

One more thing that sets apart recycler view is that we can easily decorate our items with borders, dividers dynamically. In future, we might be using images in our lists, performance is better in the case of recycler view. Also, according to me with should go with latest trends and features, in future, they might save a lot of time.

[avijitghosh82 (Avijit Ghosh)]

Go ahead and send a pull request then, I will test your implementation