hello

Hello

hello, Andrey and rdg@rmcore!

Andrey, I think you arrive seconds before rdg@rmcore

Mark, I joined late last night.

so you get to go first!

ok...I'll wait.

Andrey: do you have a question?

okay

I have an activity that hosts a fragment with an EditText

What I need is to persist the contents in this EditText when I go to the second activity

and restore the text when I go back

I've tried several methods I found on Stack Overflow

but nothing has worked yet

I'm still a noob :)

you need zero lines of code for that

it happens automatically

hence, I'd focus on what you might be doing that is blocking your desired behavior

for example, have you overridden onSaveInstanceState(), in either the fragment or the hosting activity?

no. I've only started overriding it trying to get auto-restore to work

then the text entered in the EditText should be kept

while the first activity is in the foreground, try rotating the device (portrait->landscape)

(or landscape->portrait)

this should cause your activity to be recreated

and your fragment to be recreated

if the text in your EditText is lost, then you have some problem in that activity and fragment

if the text in your EditText is kept, then I'd focus on how you are starting up the second activity (e.g., are you calling finish() on the first one as part of that?)

run that experiment, while I take a question from rdg@rmcore, and I'll be back with you in a bit

rdg@rmcore: do you have a question?

Yes. It is regarding the onclose listener of a search view for the action bar.

Other people have noticed the problem: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9327826/sear...

But I can't understand the accepted answer.

from SO "Then override unimplents methods."

I don't know what the person is trying to say.

override unimplemnts methods?

well, setOnActionExpandListener() presumably takes an implementation of OnActionExpandListener as a paramater

er, parameter

that's an interface

which you will have to implement somewhere

and implementing that interface will require some methods

ok.

presumably, onMenuItemActionExpand() and onMenuItemActionCollapse()

ok....

so this is a different mechanism to call a function when the search view is closed by pressing the "X" button?

it's a general-purpose way to get control when collapsible action items are expanded or collapsed

SearchView is one such collapsible action item

presumably, onMenuItemActionCollapse() will be called when the SearchView is collapsed

ok...so it is using methods from a parent class of SearchView?

ok

what is "it"?

hmm..let me rephrase

onMenuItemActionCollapse is a method in a parent class of SearchView?

no

oh

it is a method on OnActionExpandListener

as I wrote, that is an interface

so interface means an abstract base class?

(I am more familiar with C++ than Java)

no, interface means interface

oh ok

interface is a separate Java construct

ok...thanks.

I have another question about list views

it is related to this filter example from your book

let's say you have 25 items

hang on

and then you start typing in the filter box

ok.

have to take a call for a few minutes, will be back shortly

ok

OK, I'm back

first, let's turn back to Andrey

Andrey: do you have a follow-up from your first question, or another question?

OK, Andrey, if you do have another question, let me know

No Mark. I've just reinstalled the OS, so my app is just a bunch of text files at the moment. I think we will need to return to it next time

But

If I actually wanted to stop TextEdit from saving state

What could I do?

Mayb e it will give me some thought food :)

option #1 would be to not worry about it, but reset the EditText to your own starter value (e.g., "") when control returns to you (e.g., onResume())

option #2 would be to interfere with the onSaveInstanceState() handling

doing that for everything in an activity or fragment is easy -- just override it and do not chain to the superclass

doing that for an individual widget would require some relying on some undocumented behaviors, and I would not recommend it

option #3 would be to extend EditText and interfere with how it participates in onSaveInstanceState(), but I don't know the details of how that would be done off the top of my head

those are the options that I can think of

rdg@rmcore: back to you

okay, thanks a lot

ok

so with a list view

let's say you have ten items

then you start typing in the filter box

and now the list view has 3 items

each item has an int postition and a string associated with it

let's say you click on the item in position 2

it becomes selected

then you hit the "X" in the filter box

now the item in the list view is at position 8

because you are back to a list with 10 itmes

items

I see there is a smoothScrollToPosition(int position)

the problem is I need to know the position of the item in the original list of 10 items

not just its position in the filtered list

in my current app I actually have a list view with over a thousand items

so the filtering is a really great feature

but when the "X" is pressed the list view scrolls all the way back to the top

so how do I know the item's position in the original list?

two things first

1. The row is not selected. It might be activated, if you're using that, but it's not selected, unless you're fussing with that yourself (and probably shouldn't).

ok

2. I think the expectation is that if the user presses X that they're done with the filter results, and so I'm not convinced that what you're trying to do is necessarily the right thing. It might be -- I haven't thought it through much.

on the screen in my app the item turns blue when pressed

if that sticks around, you're using the activated state

usually used on tablet UIs, in master-detail pattern

yes....

I am using code derived from the master detail flow

there's nothing wrong with that, other than "activated" is a distinct Android concept than "selected"

so when some selects an item from the large list all the details show up in another fragment

what happens is that the details don't match the activated item in my app right now

OK, then moving the list back to the activated row makes sense

what is the base class of your ListAdapter for the ListView? ArrayAdapter? CursorAdapter? BaseAdapter? something else?

I am using an ArrayAdapter with an ArrayList<String>

this is from memory.

then you'll need to search your ArrayList<String> to find the new position

I don't have the code in front of me

Yeah, I was afraid of that

like I said the ArrayList has over a thousand strings in it.

there's another possibility that might work

but if that is what is necessary

when the user taps on the entry in the filtered list, call getItemId() for the position in the filtered list

getItemId() is a method on your ArrayAdapter

ok.

I will try getItemId()

never mind

ArrayAdapter is stupid

no?

hang on a sec while I research something

ok

there's probably a better solution than searching the ArrayList<String>, but I don't know off the top of my head what

ok

FWIW, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14562556/fi...

Andrey: your turn -- do you have another question?

I will take a look at the link.

(it's probably not what you need, but came up in a quick search)

Based on the link, I will need to review the getItem implementation.

rdg@rmcore: if you have another question, go ahead

ok my next question is about moving sqlite select statements off the display thread

this is related to my master detail flow app

when an item is activated in the long list

I end up doing one select statement from a data base table

then I do another select statement in another data base table using the results of the first select

is some cases this takes longer than 1 second on my device

I have been reading your book and I am trying to decide whether to use an Async Task or to modify your https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-loaderex

of those two, definitely use an AsyncTask

I'll be discontinuing CWAC-LoaderEx at some point

as I never use it

the thing is I create my database ahead of time and it is treated as read only data during run time

oh

and the code is not very good

ok...

thanks for the recommendation

I was leaning towards AsyncTask because I thought it might be simpler to implement

I have another topic

go ahead

how can I make clickable links in the about dialog of my app?

um

do I need to tell it somehow that it is reading html text instead of just plain text?

what is "it"?

sorry...

a TextView? a WebView? something else?

textview

to show HTML in a TextView, call Html.fromHtml(), and pass the result to setText() on the TextView

fromHtml() supports a smattering of basic HTML tags, including <a>

ok. cool.

that is all I have

old, but it'll still give you a rough idea of the supported HTML tags

thanks again for your code samples.

I used an example from the book of your unzip function

you are very welcome

this allowed me to compress my database from ~12 MB to ~4 MB

do you mean SQLiteAssetHelper?

otherwise, I am not sure what you are referring to

I could look again but I had the pdf open and searched for zip until I found the unzip code..

code starts on pg 630 o fthe book

it's a big book

I sometimes forget what's in it

in tutorial #16

oh yeah!

I had forgotten about that

that's standard Java stuff

I like the format of the book because it gives background discussion of the topics and then gives short examples.

The examples can be cloned from github.

This combination is really helpful.

yeah, I prefer focused samples more so than "everything but the kitchen sink" massive projects

To read about a topic and have a working example.

I am not proficient in "standard Java stuff" so it is helpful.

thanks for your time.

you're welcome!

how do I see the transcripts of these chat sessions?

they get posted a few minutes after the chat ends

ok

and they go back years and years... :-)

indeed.

ok. talk to you later.

bye