Android Documentation

ANDROID DOCUMENTATION
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Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project
Welcome to Android!
The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating syst em, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the An droid SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use which runs on top of a Linux kernel. If you want to know how to develop applications for Android , you're in the right place. This site provides a variety of documentation that will help you learn about Android and develop mobile applications for the platform. An early look at the the Android SDK is also available. It includes sample projects with source code, development tools, an emulator, and of course all the libraries you'll need to bui ld an Android application. Download the SDK
To start learning about the Android platform, please read the documentation in the following order: What is Android? An overview of the Android platform Getting Started All the basics, including Hello World Developing Applications The nuts and bolts of Android applications Developer Toolbox In-depth information on specific topics Reference Information A myriad of reference material Sample Code Several sample Android applications for your viewing pleasure Frequently Asked Questions Common issues and questions
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Applications
Android will ship with a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. All applications are written using the Java programming language.
Application Framework
Developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. The application architecture is designed to simplify the reuse of components; any application can publish its capabilities and any other application may then make use of those capabilities (subj ect to security constraints enforced by the framework). This same mechanism allows components to be replaced by th e user. Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems, includ ing: A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, including li sts, grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graph ics, and layout files A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar An Activity Manager that manages the lifecycle of applications and provides a commo n navigation backstack For more details and a walkthrough of an application, see Writing an Android Application .
Libraries
Android includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These capabilities are exposed to developers through the Android application frame work. Some of the core libraries are listed below: System C library - a BSD-derived implementation of the standard C system library (libc), tuned for embedded Linux-based devices Media Libraries - based on PacketVideo's OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image f iles, including MPEG , H.26 , MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG Surface Manager - manages access to the display subsystem and seamlessly composites 2D an d 3D graphic layers from multiple applications LibWebCore - a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android b rowser and an embeddable web view SGL - the underlying 2D graphics engine 3D libraries - an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1. APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimize d 3D software rasterizer FreeType - bitmap and vector font rendering SQLite - a powerful and lightweight relational database engin e available to all applications
android.graphics is the core rendering package. android.text, android.text.method, android.text.style, and android.text.util supply a rich set of text processing tools, supporting rich text, input methods, etc. android.database contains low-level APIs for working with databases. android.content provides various services for accessing data on the device: applicatio ns installed on the device and their associated resources, and content providers for persistent dynamic data. android.view is the core user-interface framework. android.widget supplies standard user interface elements (lists, buttons, layout managers, etc) built from the view package. android.app provides the high-level application model, implemented using Activities.
Other Notable Packages

These packages provide additional domain-specific features of th e Android platform. They are not necessary for basic application development. android.provider contains definitions for various standard content providers includ ed with the platform. android.telephony provides APIs for interacting with the device's phone stack. android.webkit includes various APIs for working with web-based content.
2. Fill out the project details The next screen allows you to enter the relevant details for your project. Here's an example:
Here's what each field on this screen means:
Project Name Package Name
This is the name of the directory or folder on your computer that you want to contain the project. This is the package namespace similar to the Java programming lang uage that you want all your source code to reside under. This also sets the package name under which the stub Activity will be generated. The package name you use in your application must be unique a cross all packages installed on the system; for this reason, it's very important to use a standard domain-style package for your applications. In the example above, we used the package domain "com.google.android"; you should use a different one appropriate to your organization.
Activity Name
This is the name for the class stub that will be generated by the plugin. This will be a subclass of Android's Activity class. An Activity is simply a class that can run and do work. It can create a UI if it chooses, but it doesn't need to. This is the human-readable title for your application.
Application Name
The checkbox for toggling "Use default location" allows you to change the location on disk where the project's files will be generated and stored.
Once we've constructed the TextView, we need to tell it what to display: tv.setText("Hello, Android"); Nothing too surprising there. At this point, we've constructed a TextView and told it what text to display. The final step is to connect this TextView with the on-screen display, like so: setContentView(tv); The setContentView() method on Activity indicates to the system which View should be associated with the Activity's UI. If an Activity doesn't call this method, no UI is present at all and the system will display a blank screen. For our purposes, all we want is to display some text, so we pass it the TextView we just created. There it is "Hello, World" in Android The next step, of course, is to see it running.
Run the Code: Hello, Android

The Eclipse plugin makes it very easy to run your applications. Begin by selecting the Run > Open Run Dialog menu entry; you should see a dialog like this:
Next, highlight the "Android Application" entry, and then press the icon in the top left corner (the one depicting a sheet of paper with a plus sign in the corner) or simply double-click the "Android Application" entry. You should have a new launcher entry named "New_configura tion".
That's "Hello, World" in Android. Pretty straightforward, eh? The next sections of the tutorial offer more detailed information that you may find valuable as you learn more about Android.
Upgrading the UI to an XML Layout

The "Hello, World" example you just completed uses what we call "programmatic" UI layout. This means that you construct and build your application's UI directly in source code. If you've done much UI programming, you're probably familiar with how brittle that approach can sometimes be: small changes in layout can result in big source-code headaches. It's also very easy to forget to properly connect Views together, which can result in errors in your layout and wasted time debugging your code. That's why Android provides an alternate UI construction model: XML-based layout files. The easiest way to explain this concept is to show an example. Here's an XML layout file that is identical in behavior to the programmatically-constructed example you just completed: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <TextView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com /apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:text="Hello, Android"/> The general structure of an Android XML layout file is simple. It's a tree of tags, where each tag is the name of a View class. In this example, it's a very simple tree of one element, a TextView. You can use the name of any class that extends View as a tag name in your XML layouts, including custom View classes you define in your own code. This structure makes it very easy to quickly build up UIs, using a much simpler structure and syntax than you would in source code. This model is inspired by the web development model, where you can separate the presentation of your application (its UI) from the application logic used to fetch and fill in data.
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The last thing you need to do is modify your HelloAndroid source code to use the new XML version of your UI, instead of the hard-coded version. Here's what your new class will look like. As you can see, the source code becomes much simpler: public class HelloAndroid extends Activity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); setContentView(R.layout.main); } } When you make this change, don't just copy-and-paste it in. Try out the code-completion feature on that R class. You'll probably find that it helps a lot. Now that you've made this change, go ahead and re-run your application all you need to do is press the green Run arrow icon, or select Run > Run Last Launched from the menu. You should see.... well, exactly the same thing you saw before After all, the point was to show that the two different layout approaches produce identical results. There's a lot more to creating these XML layouts, but that's as far as we'll go here. Read the Implementing a User Interface documentation for more information on the power of this approach.
Debugging Your Project

The Android Plugin for Eclipse also has excellent integration w ith the Eclipse debugger. To demonstrate this, let's introduce a bug into our code. Change your HelloAndroid source code to look like this: public class HelloAndroid extends Activity { /** Called when the activity is first created. */ @Override public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); Object o = null; o.toString(); setContentView(R.layout.main); } } This change simply introduces a NullPointerException into your code . If you run your application again, you'll eventually see this:
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Anatomy of an Android Application

There are four building blocks to an Android application: Activity Intent Receiver Service Content Provider Not every application needs to have all four, but your appli cation will be written with some combination of these. Once you have decided what components you need for your applica tion, you should list them in a file called AndroidManifest.xml. This is an XML file where you declare the components of your application and what their capabilities and requirements are. See the Android manifest file documentation for complete details.
Activity
Activities are the most common of the four Android building blocks. An activity is usually a single screen in your application. Each activity is implemented as a single class that extends the Activity base class. Your class will display a user interface composed of Views and respond to events. Most applications consist of multiple screens. For example, a text messaging application might have one screen that shows a list of contacts to send messages to, a second screen to write the message to the chosen contact, and other screens to review old messages or change settings. Each of these screens would be implemented as an activity. Moving to another screen is accomplished by a starting a new activity. In some cases an activity may return a value to the previous activity -- for example an activity that lets the user pick a photo would return the chosen photo to the caller. When a new screen opens, the previous screen is paused and put onto a history stack. The user can navigate backward through previously opened screens in the history. Screens can also cho ose to be removed from the history stack when it would be inappropriate for them to remain. Android retains hi story stacks for each application launched from the home screen.
Intent and Intent Filters

Android uses a special class called an Intent to move from screen to screen. An intent describes what an application wants done. The two most important parts of the intent data structure are the action and the data to act upon. Typical values for action are MAIN (the front door of the activity), VIEW, PICK, EDIT, etc. The data is expressed as a URI. For example, to view contact information for a person, you would create an intent with the VIEW action and the data set to a URI representing that person. There is a related class called an IntentFilter. While an intent is effectively a request to do something, an intent filter is a description of what intents an activity (or intent receiver, see below) is capable of handling. An activity that is able to display contact information for a person would publish an IntentFilter that said that it knows how to handle the action VIEW when applied to data representing a person. Activities publish the ir IntentFilters in the AndroidManifest.xml file. Navigating from screen to screen is accomplished by resolving intents. To navigate forward, an activity calls startActivity(myIntent). The system then looks at the intent filters for all installed applications and picks the activity whose intent filters best matches myIntent. The new activity is informed of the intent, which causes it to be launched. The process of resolving intents happens at run time when startActivity is called, which offers two key benefits: Activities can reuse functionality from other components simply by making a request in the form of an Intent Activities can be replaced at any time by a new Activity with an equivalent IntentFilter
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Tutorial: A Notepad Application

The tutorial in this section gives you a "hands-on" introduction to the Android framework and the tools you use to build applications on it. Starting from a preconfigured project file, it guides you through the process of developing a simple notepad application and provides concrete examples of how to set up the project, develop the application logic and user interface, and then compile and run the application. The tutorial presents the notepad application development as a set of exercises (see below), each consisting of several steps. You can follow along with the steps in each exercise and gradually build up and refine your application. The exerci ses explain each step in detail and provide all the sample code you need to complete the application. When you are finished with the tutorial, you will have created a functioning Android application and learned in dep th about many of the most important concepts in Android development. If you want to add more complex features to your application, you can look at and use the code in the notepad applicati on that is supplied in the sample code area of the Android SDK.
Contents
Who Should Use this Tutorial Preparing for the Exercises Exercises Other Resources and Further Learning
Who Should Use this Tutorial

This tutorial is designed for experienced developers, especially those with knowledge of the Java programming language. If you haven't written Java applications before, you can still use the tutorial, but you might need to work at a slower pace. Also, the tutorial builds on the information provided in the Installing the SDK and Hello Android documents, which explain in detail how to set up your development environment for buildi ng Android applications. Before you start the tutorial, make sure that you have already downloaded the SDK and installed it according to the instructions. Finally, this tutorial describes how to develop the notepad application in the Eclipse development environment, with th e Android plugin installed. If you are not using Eclipse, you ca n follow the exercises and build the application, but you will need to determine how to accomplish the Eclipse-specific steps in your en vironment. If you want to add more complex features to your application, you can look at and use the code in the notepad application that is supplied in the sample code are a of the Android SDK. The tutorial assumes that you have some familiarity with the basic Android application concepts and terminology. If you aren't yet familiar with those, you should read Overview of an Android Application and Application Lifecycle before continuing.
Preparing for the Exercises

Before you begin, it's important that you install the SDK and set up your Eclipse development. Once your environment is set up, locate and unpack the exercises archive, which is included in the SDK package. The archive includes a series of Eclipse project files that are used in the exercises. You can use these project files instead of creating and configuring your own project files. To get the tutorial project files: 1. Download the project exercises archive (.zip) 2. Unpack the archive file to a suitable location on your machine 3. Open the NotepadCodeLab folder Inside the NotepadCodeLab folder, you should see six project files: Notepadv1, Notepadv2, Notepadv3, Notepadv1Solution, Notepadv2Solution and Notepadv3Solution. The Notepadv* projects are the starting points for each of the exercises, while the Notepadv*Solution projects are the exercise solutions. If you are having trouble with a particular exercise, you can compare your current work against the exe rcise solution to try and track down the problem.
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Step 2
Take a look at the DBHelper class this class is provided to encapsulate data access to a SQLite database that will hold our notes data and allow us to update it.
Accessing and modifying data For this exercise, we are just going to use a SQLite database directly to store our
Typically you would implement this using a ContentProvider, and in fact the full data, but in a real application it would be Notepad application included with the SDK does implement su ch a much better to write a proper ContentProvider. However, there is no reason you can't just use your own SQLite ContentProvider to encapsulate this behavior instead. database directly as we do here. The main thing to notice about this class is that it takes care of the details of storing, retrieving and updating data in the SQLite If you are interested, you can find out more about content providers or the database for us. There are methods for retrieving all the rows, retrieving a row whole subject of Storing, Retrieving, and based on rowIds, creating a new row, deleting an existing ro w and updating a row. Exposing Data. If you want a quick primer in how to use the SQLite Database for your own applications, either take a look at this class or better yet, look at the full Notepad application included with the SDK in the samples/ folder as the sample uses a ContentProvider.
Step 3
Open the notepad_list.xml file in res/layout and take a look at it: This is a layout definition file with a default starting point in it, we have provided this as a convenience to get you going quickly. a. All Android layout files must start with the XML header line: <?xml version= 1.0 encoding= utf-8 ?>. b. Also, the next definition will often (but not always) be a layout definition of some kind, in this case a LinearLayout. c. Note also that the xml namespace of Android should always be d efined in the top level component or layout in the XML so that android: tags can be used through the rest of the file: xmlns:android= http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/a ndroid
Layouts and activities Most Activities will have a layout associated with them. The layout will be the "face" of the activity to the user. In this case our layout will take over the whole screen and provide a list of notes. Full screen layouts are not the only option for an Activity however. You might also want to use a floating layout (for example, a dialog or alert), or perhaps you don't need a layout at all (the activity will be invisible to the user unless you specify some kind of layout for it to use).
Step 4
We need to create the layout to hold our list. Add code inside of the LinearLayout tag so the whole file looks like this: (you may have to hit the Source tab in order to edit the XML file) <?xml version= 1.0 encoding= utf-8 ?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android= http://schemas.android .com/apk/res/android android:layout_width= wrap_content android:layout_height= wrap_content > <ListView id= @id/android:list android:layout_width= wrap_content android:layout_height= wrap_content /> <TextView id= @id/android:empty android:layout_width= wrap_content android:layout_height= wrap_content android:text= @string/no_notes /> </LinearLayout>
a. The ListView and TextView can be thought as two alternative views, only one of which will be displayed at once. ListView will be used when there are notes to be shown, wh ile the TextView (which has a default value of "No Notes Yet!" defined as a string resource, will be displayed if there aren't any notes to display). b. The @ in the id strings of the ListView and TextView means that the XML parser should parse and expand the rest of the id string and use an ID resource.
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Step 9
Fill out the body of the onCreate() method. Here we will set the title for the activity (shown at the top of the screen), use the notepad_list layout we have created for the activity display contents, set up the DBHelper instance we will use to access notes data, then populate the list with the available note titles: a. call super() with the icicle parameter passed into our method b. setContentView to R.layout.notepad_list c. Create a new private class field called dbHelper of class DBHelper (before the onCreate method) d. Back in the onCreate method, construct a DBHelper instance assign to the dbHelper field (note, you must pass this into the constructor for DBHelper) e. Finally, call a new method -fillData()- gets the data and populates it using the helper, we haven't defined it yet f. onCreate() should now look like this: @Override public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); setContentView(R.layout.notepad_list); dbHelper = new DBHelper(this); fillData(); } And remember to add the DBHelper field definition (right under the noteNumber definition ): private DBHelper dbHelper;
Step 10
Fill out the body of the onCreateOptionsMenu() method. We are going to add just one menu item for now, "Add Item", using a string we will create in strings.xml, and defined with a constant we will create at the top of the class to identify the Add Item operation. a. In strings.xml resource (under res/values), add a new string for menu_insert with text Add Item <string name= menu_insert >Add Item</string>, then save the file b. Also, you need a menu position constant at the top of the Notepadv1 class (right under the KEY_BODY definition): public static final int INSERT_ID = Menu.FIRST; c. In the onCreateOptionsMenu() method, add the menu item. Also take care of the result of the super call being returned. The whole method should now look like this: @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { boolean result = super.onCreateOptionsMenu( menu); menu.add(0, INSERT_ID, R.string.menu_insert ); return result; }
More on menus The notepad application we are constructing only scratches the surface with menus. You can also add shortcut keys for menu items, create submenus and even add menu items to other applications!.
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Step 13
Define the fillData() method. This is fairly long: This method uses ArrayAdapter, which is the simplest way of putting data into a ListView. ArrayAdapter takes either a List or an array of Strings, and binds them into a text view provided in the layout defined for the list row (this is the text1 field in our notes_row.xml layout). The method simply obtains a list of notes from the database helper, constructs a List of Strings using the title strings from each row, and then creates an ArrayAdapter out of those items and bound to use the notes_row we defined. private void fillData() { // We need a list of strings for the list i tems List<String> items = new ArrayList<String>( );
List adapters Our example uses a very simple array adapter which binds an array or list of items into a ListView. More commonly in Android, List Adapters go hand in hand with ContentProviders, and this is also a very easy way to use lists. To bind a ContentProvider to a ListView you can use a android.widget.SimpleCursorAdapter to bind data from a ContentProvider into a ListView
// Get all of the rows from the database an d create the item list List<Row> rows = dbHelper.fetchAllRows(); for (Row row : rows) { items.add(row.title); } // Now create an array adapter and set it t o display using our row ArrayAdapter<String> notes = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, R.layout .notes_row, items); setListAdapter(notes); } a. ArrayAdapter needs a List of Strings (List<String>) containing the items to display b. The data is read out of the database as rows, and the title field from each row is used to populate the list of strings c. We specify the notes_row view we created as the receptacle for the data d. If you get compiler errors about classes not being found, ctrl-shift-O or (cmd-shift-O on the mac) to organize imports. Note: that for this exercise we use an ArrayAdapter, this is not a very scalable solution and more typically a SimpleCursorAdapter would be used with a ContentProvider or at least a Cursor returned from a query. See the sidebar on List Adapters for more information.
Step 14
Run it! a. Right click on the Notepadv1 project b. From the popup menu, select Run As -> Android Application c. If you see a dialog come up, select Android Launcher as the way of running the application (you can also use the link near the top of the dialog to set this as your default for the workspace, this is recommended as it will stop the plugin from asking you this every time) d. Add new notes by hitting the menu button and selecting Add Item from the menu
Solution and Next Steps

You can see the solution to this class in Notepadv1Solution from the zip file to compare with your own. Once you are ready, move on to Tutorial Exercise 2 to add the ability to create, edit and delete notes.
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Step 4
In the onMenuItemSelected() method, add a new case for DELETE_ID: dbHelper.deleteRow(rows.get(getSelection()) .rowId); fillData(); break; a. This uses the getSelection() method from the ListActivity to see what note is currently selected from the list b. It then looks that row up from the rows field we have been holding on to, and gets the rowId, and uses it to delete the row using the DBHelper c. We fill data afterwards to keep everything up to date d. The whole method should now look like this: @Override public boolean onMenuItemSelected(int featureId , Item item) { super.onMenuItemSelected(featureId, item); switch(item.getId()) { case INSERT_ID: createNote(); fillData(); break; case DELETE_ID: dbHelper.deleteRow(rows.get(getSelectio n()).rowId); fillData(); break; } return true; }
Starting Other Activities As well as starting intents in classes we already know about, be they in our own application or another application, we can also create intents without knowing exactly which application will handle it. For example, we might want to open a page in a browser, and for this we still use an intent. But instead of specifying a class to handle it, we use a predefined Intent constant, and a content URI that describes what we want to do.
Step 5
Fill in the body of the createNote() method: We will create a new Intent to create a note (ACTIVITY_CREATE) using the NoteEdit class. We then fire the Intent using the startSubActivity() method call. Intent i = new Intent(this, NoteEdit.class) ; startSubActivity(i, ACTIVITY_CREATE); Don't worry about the fact that NoteEdit doesn't exist yet, we will fix that soon. Note: in this example our Intent uses a class name specifically. While this makes sense sometimes, it is more common to call an Intent using an action and contentURI. See android.content.Intent for more information.
Step 6
Fill in the body of the onListItemClick() override. onListItemClick() is the overridden method that is called when the user selects an item from the list. It is passed four parameters: the ListView object it was invoked from, the View inside the ListView that was clicked on, the position in the list that was clicked, and the rowId of the item that was clicked. In this instance we can ignore the first two parameters (we only have one ListView it could be), and we ignore the rowId as well. All we are interested in is the position that the user selected. We use this to get the data from the correct row, and bundle it up to send in to the NoteEdit activity.
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Step 8
Open the file note_edit.xml that has been provided and take a look at it. This is the UI code for the Note Editor. This is the most sophisticated UI we have dealt with yet. The file is given to you to avoid problems that may sneak in when typing the code in (the XML is very strict about case sensitivity and structure, mistakes in these are the usual cause of problems with layout XML files). There is a new parameter used here that we haven't seen before: android:layout_weight (in this case set to use the value 1). layout_weight is used in LinearLayouts to assign "importance" to views within the layout. All views have a default layout_weight of zero, meaning they take up only as much room on the screen as they need to be displayed. Assigning a value higher than zero will split up the rest of the available space in the parent according to the value of the view's layout_weight and its ratio to the overall layout_weight specified in the current layout for this and other views.
The Art of Layout The provided note_edit.xml layout file is the most sophisticated one in the application we will be building, but that doesn't mean it is even close to the kind of sophistication you will be likely to want in real Android applications. Creating a good UI is part art and part science, and the rest is work. Mastering Android layout is an essential part of creating a good looking Android application. Take a look at the View Gallery for some example layouts and how to use them. The ApiDemos sample project is also a great resource from which to learn how to create different layouts.
To give an example: let's say we have a text label and two text edit views in a horizontal row. The label has no layout_weight specified, so it takes up the minimum space required to render. If the layout_weight of each of the two text edit views is set to 1, the remaining width in the parent layout will be split equally between them. If one has a layout_weight of 1 and the other has a layout_weight of 2, then one third of the remaining space will be given to the first, and two thirds to the second. This layout also demonstrates how to nest multiple layouts inside each other to achieve a more complex and pleasant layout. In this example, a horizontal linear layout is nested inside the vertical one to allow the title label and text field to be alongside each other horizontally.
Step 9
Create a NoteEdit class that extends android.app.Activity. This is the first time we will have created an activity without the Android Eclipse plugin doing it for us. When you do so, the onCreate() method is not automatically overridden for you. It is hard to imagine an activity that doesn't override the onCreate() method, so this should be the first thing you do (there is an override/implement methods option available from the right click popup menu in the eclipse editor that we will use) a. Right click on the com.google.android.demo.notepad2 package in the Package Explorer, and select New->Class from the popup menu b. Fill in NoteEdit for the Name: field in the dialog c. In the Superclass: field, enter android.app.Activity (you can also just type Activity and hit Ctrl-Space on Windows and Linux or Cmd-Space on the Mac, to invoke code assist and find the right package and class) d. Hit the Finish button e. In the resulting NoteEdit class, right click in the editor window and select Source->Override/Implement Methods... f. Scroll down through the checklist in the dialog until you see onCreate(Bundle) and check the box next to it g. Hit the OK button.
Step 10
Fill in the body of the onCreate() method. This will set the title of our new activity to say "Edit Note" (one of the strings defined in strings.xml). It will also set the content view to use our note_edit.xml layout file. We can then grab handles to the title and body text edit views, and the confirm button, so that our class can use them to set and get the note title and body, and attach an event to the confirm button for when it is pressed by the user.
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Step 11
Fill in the body of the onClick() method. This is the code that will be run when the user clicks on the confirm button. We want this to grab the title and body text from the edit text fields, and put them into the return bundle so that they can be passed back to the activity that invoked this Intent in the first place. If the operation is an edit rather than a create, we also want to put the rowId into the bundle as well so that the Notepadv2 class can save the changes back to the correct note. a. Create a bundle and put the title and body text into it using the constants defined in Notepadv2 as keys Bundle bundle = new Bundle(); bundle.putString(Notepadv2.KEY_TITLE, titleT ext.getText().toString()); bundle.putString(Notepadv2.KEY_BODY, bodyTex t.getText().toString()); if (rowId != null) { bundle.putLong(Notepadv2.KEY_ROW_ID, row Id); } b. Set the result information, including the bundle, and finish the activity: The setResult() method is used to set the result code, return data string, and extras bundle to be passed back to the Intent caller. In this case everything worked, so we return RESULT_OK for the result code. We are not using the string data field in this case, so we pass a null back for that and pass the bundle we have just created with the title, body and rowId information in it. The finish() call is used to signal that the activity is done (like a return call). Anything set in the Result will then be returned to the caller, along with execution control. setResult(RESULT_OK, null, bundle); finish(); c. The full onCreate() method (plus supporting class fields) should now look like this: private EditText titleText; private EditText bodyText; private Long rowId; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); setContentView(R.layout.note_edit); titleText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.ti tle); bodyText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.bod y); Button confirmButton = (Button) findViewByI d(R.id.confirm); rowId = null; Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras(); if (extras != null) { String title = extras.getString(Notepad v2.KEY_TITLE); String body = extras.getString(Notepadv 2.KEY_BODY); rowId = extras.getLong(Notepadv2.KEY_RO W_ID); if (title != null) { titleText.setText(title); } if (body != null) { bodyText.setText(body); } }
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Tutorial: Notepad Exercise 3

In this exercise, you will use life-cycle event callbacks to store and retrieve application state data. This exercise demonstrates: Life-cycle events and how your application can use them Techniques for maintaining application state
Step 1
The current example has some problems hitting the back button when editing causes a crash, and anything else that happens during editing will cause the edits to be lost. To fix this, we will move most of the functionality for creating and editing the note into the NoteEdit class, and introduce a full lifecycle for editing notes. Import Notepadv3 into Eclipse. If you see an error about AndroidManifest.xml, or some problems related to an Android zip file, right click on the project and select Android Tools->Fix Project Properties from the popup menu. The starting point for this exercise is exactly the same as the solution for Notepadv2. a. Remove the NoteEdit code to parse out the title and body from the extras bundle. We are going to use the DBHelper class to access the notes from the database directly. All we need passed into the activity is a rowId (if we are editing, if creating we don't need anything). We will get rid of the properties that were being passed in through the extras bundle that we were using to set the title and body text edit values in the UI. b. Remove the lines that read: String title = extras.getString(Notepadv3.K EY_TITLE); String body = extras.getString(Notepadv3.KE Y_BODY); and if (title != null) { titleText.setText(title); } if (body != null) { bodyText.setText(body); }
(Extra credit, you could replace the remaining if (extras != null) block with a ternary operator as well: rowId = extras != null ? extras.getLong(Not epadv3.KEY_ROW_ID) : null;
Step 2
Create a class field for a DBHelper at the top of the class: private DBHelper dbHelper; and an instance of DBHelper in the onCreate() method (right below the super.onCreate() call): dbHelper = new DBHelper(this);
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rowId = icicle != null ? icicle.getLong(Not epadv3.KEY_ROW_ID) : null; if (rowId == null) { Bundle extras = getIntent().getExtras() ; if (extras != null) { rowId = extras.getLong(Notepadv3.KE Y_ROW_ID); } } populateFields(); confirmButton.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener( ) { public void onClick(View arg0) { setResult(RESULT_OK); finish(); } });
Step 6
Define the populateFields() method. private void populateFields() { if (rowId != null) { DBHelper.Row row = dbHelper.fetchRow(ro wId); if (row.rowId > -1) { titleText.setText(row.title); bodyText.setText(row.body); } } }
Step 7
Override methods onFreeze(), onPause() and onResume() These are our lifecycle methods (along with onCreate() which we already have). onFreeze() is called by Android if the Activity is being stopped and may be killed before it is resumed! This means it should store any state necessary to re-initialize to the same condition when the activity is restarted. It is the counterpart to the onCreate() method, and in fact the icicle bundle passed in to onCreate() is the same bundle that you construct as outState in the onFreeze() method. onPause() and onResume() are also complimentary methods. onPause() is always called when the Activity ends, even if we instigated that (with a finish call for example). We will use this to save the current note back to the database. Good practice is to release any resources that can be released duri ng an onPause() as well, to take up less resources when in the passive state. For this reason we will close the DBHelper class and set the field to null so that it can be garbage collected if necessary. onResume() on the other hand, will re-create the dbHelper instance so we can use it, and then read the note out of the database again and populate the fields.
Why handling lifecycle events is important If you are used to always having control in your applications, you might not understand why all this lifecycle work is necessary. The reason is that in Android, you are not in control of your activity, the operating system is! As we have already seen, the Android model is based around Activities calling each other. When one Activity calls another, the current activity is paused at the very least, and may be killed altogether if the system starts to run low on resources. If this happens, your Activity will have to store enough state to come back up later, preferably in the same state it was in when it was killed. Android has a well-defined lifecycle. Lifecycle events can happen even if you are not handing off control to another activity explicitly. For example, perhaps a call comes in to the handset. If this happens, and your activity is running, it will be swapped out while the call activity takes over.
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Step 10
Also remove the lines which set the title and body from the onListItemClick() method (again they are no longer needed, only the rowId is): i.putExtra(KEY_TITLE, rows.get(position).title); i.putExtra(KEY_BODY, rows.get(position).bod y); Run it! (use Run As -> Android Application on the project right click menu again)
Solution and Next Steps

You can see the solution to this exercise in Notepadv3Solution from the zip file to compare with your own. When you are ready, move on to the Tutorial Extra Credit exercise, where you can use the Eclipse debugger to examine the lifecycle events as they happen.
Tutorial: Extra Credit

In this exercise, you will use the debugger to look at the work you did in Exercise 3. This exercise demonstrates: How to set breakpoints to observe execution How to run your application in debug mode
Step 1
Using the working Notepadv3, put breakpoints in the code at the beginning of the onCreate(), onPause(), onFreeze() and onResume() methods in the NoteEdit class (if you are not familiar with Eclipse, just right click in the narrow grey border on the left of the edit window at the line you want a breakpoint, and select Toggle Breakpoint, you should see a blue dot appear).
Step 2
Now start the notepad demo in debug mode: a. Right click on the Notepadv3 project and from the Debug menu select Debug As -> Android Application. b. The Android emulator should say "waiting for debugger to connect" briefly and then run the application. c. If it gets stuck on the waiting... screen, quit the emulator and Eclipse, from the command line do an adb kill-server, and then restart Eclipse and try again.
Step 3
When you edit or create a new note you should see the breakpoints getting hit and the execution stopping.
Step 4
Hit the Resume button to let execution continue (yellow rectangle with a green triangle to its right in the Eclipse toolbars near the top).
Step 5
Experiment a bit with the confirm and back buttons, and try hitting home and making other mode changes. Watch what lifecycle events are generated and when. The Android Eclipse plugin not only offers excellent debuggin g support for your application development, but also superb profiling support. If your application is running too slow, this can help you find the bottlenecks and fix them.
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Here is a list of the basic steps in building an application. 1. Create your required resource files This includes the AndroidManifest.xml global description file, string files that your application needs, and layout files describing your user in terface. A full list of optional and required files and syntax details for each is given in File List for an Android Application. 2. Design your user interface See Implementing a UI for details on elements of the Android screen. 3. Implement your Activity (this page You will create one class/file for each screen in your applicatio n. Screens will inherit from an android.app class, typically android.app.Activity for basic screens, android.app.ListActivity for list screens, or android.app.Dialog for dialog boxes. You will implement the required callbacks th at let you draw your screen, query data, and commit changes, and also perform any required tasks such as opening additional screens or reading data from the device. Common tasks, such as opening a new screen or reading data from the device, are described below. The list of files you'll need for your application are described in List of Files for an Android Application. 4. Build and install your package. The Android SDK has some nice tools for generating projects and debugging code.
Implementing Activity Callbacks

Android calls a number of callbacks to let you draw your screen, store data before pausing, and refresh data after closing. You must implement at least some of these methods. See Lifetime of a Screen to learn when and in what order these methods are called. Here are some of the standard types of screen classes that Android provides android.app.Activity - This is a standard screen, with no specialization. android.app.ListActivity - This is a screen that is used to display a list of something. It hosts a ListView object, and exposes methods to let you identify the selected item, receive callbacks when the selected item changes, and perform other list-related actions. android.app.Dialog - This is a small, popup dialog-style window that isn't intended to remain in the history stack. (It is not resizeable or moveable by the user.
Opening a New Screen

Your Activity will often need to open another Activity screen as it progresses. This new screen can be part of the same application or part of another application, the new screen can be floating or full screen, it can return a result, and you can decide whether to close this screen and remove it from the history stack when you are done with it, or to keep the screen open in history. These next sections describe all these options.
Floating or full?
When you open a new screen you can decide whether to make it transparent or floating, or full-screen. The choice of new screen affects the event sequence of events in the old screen (if the new screen obscures the old screen, a different series of events is called in the old screen . See Lifetime of an Activity for details. Transparent or floating windows are implemented in three stan dard ways Create an app.Dialog class Create an app.AlertDialog class Set the Theme_Dialog theme attribute to @android:style/Theme.Dialog in your AndroidManifest.xml file. For example <activity class="AddRssItem" android:label="Add an item" android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Dialog"/> Calling startActivity( or startSubActivity( will open a new screen in whatever way it defines itself (if it uses a floating theme it will be floating, otherwise it will be full screen .
Opening a Screen
When you want to open a new screen, you can either explicitly specify the activity class to open, or you can let the operating system decide which screen to open, based upon the data and various parameters you pass in. A screen is opened by calling startActivity and passing in an Intent object, which specifies the criteria for the handling screen. To specify a specific screen, call Intent.setClass or setClassName with the exact activity class to open. Otherwise, set a variety of values and
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} else { myFightFunction(data, extras); } default: break; } } // Class SentResult // Temporary screen to let the user choose somethin g. private OnClickListener mLincolnListener = new OnClickListener(){ public void onClick(View v) { Bundle stats = new Bundle(); stats.putString("height","6\'4\""); stats.putString("weight", "190 lbs"); stats.putString("reach", "74\""); setResult(RESULT_OK, "Lincoln", stats); finish(); } }; private OnClickListener mWashingtonListener = n ew OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ Bundle stats = new Bundle(); stats.putString("height","6\'2\""); stats.putString("weight", "190 lbs"); stats.putString("reach", "73\""); setResult(RESULT_OK, "Washington", Bund le); finish(); } };
Lifetime of the new screen

An activity can remove itself from the history stack by calling Activity.finish( on itself, or the activity that opened the screen can call Activity.finishSubActivity( on any screens that it opens to close them.
Listening for Button Clicks

Button click and other UI event capturing are covered in Listening for UI Notifications on the UI Design page.
Configuring General Window Properties

You can set a number of general window properties, such as whet her to display a title, whether the window is floating, and whether it displays an icon, by calling methods on the Window member of the underlying View object for the window. Examples include calling getWindow( .requestFeature( (or the convenience method requestWindowFeature( some_feature to hide the title. Here is an example of hiding the ti tle bar //Hide the title bar requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_NO_TITLE);
Storing and Retrieving State

If your application is dumped from memory because of space concerns, it will lose all user interface state information such as checkbox state and text box values as well as class member values. Android calls Activity.onFreeze before it pauses the application. This method hands in a Bundle that can be used to store name/value pairs that will persist and be handed back to the application even if it is dropped from memory. Android will pass this Bundle back to you when it calls onCreate( . This
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Receiver Java code: public class AlarmReceiver extends IntentReceiver{ // Display an alert that we've received a messa ge. @Override public void onReceiveIntent(Context context, In tent intent){ // Send a text notification to the scre en. NotificationManager nm = (NotificationManag er) context.getSystemService(Context.NOTIFICATI ON_SERVICE); nm.notifyWithText(R.id.alarm, "Alarm!!!", NotificationManager.LENGT H_SHORT, null); } }
Other system messages

You can listen for other system messages sent by Android as well, such as USB connection/removal messages, SMS arrival messages, and timezone changes. See Intent for a list of broadcast messages to listen for. Messages are marked "Broadcast Action" in the documentation.
Listening for phone events

The telephony package overview page describes how to register to listen for phone events.
Setting Alarms
Android provides an AlarmManager service that will let you specify an Intent to send at a designated time. This intent is typically used to start an application at a preset time. (Note If you want to send a notification to a sleeping or running application, use Handler instead.
Displaying Alerts
There are two major kinds of alerts that you may display to the user (1 Normal alerts are displayed in response to a user action, such as trying to perform an action that is not allowed. (2 Out-of-band alerts, called notifications, are displayed as a result of something happening in the background, such as the user receiving new e-mail.
Normal Alerts
Android provides a number of ways for you to show popup notifications to your user as they interact with your application. Class app.Dialog app.AlertDialog or Context.showAlert( ProgressDialog A dialog box used to indicate progress of an operation with a known progress value or an indeterminate length (setProgress(bool . See Views > Progress Bar in ApiDemos for examples. By setting the theme of an activity to android theme="android style/Theme.Dialog" , your activity will take on the appearance of a normal dialog, floating on top of whatever was underneath it. You usually set the theme through the android theme attribute in your AndroidManifest.xml. The advantage of this over Dialog and AlertDialog is that Appli cation has a much better managed Description A generic floating dialog box with a layout that you design. A popup alert dialog with two buttons (typically OK and Cancel that take callback handlers. It can be created separately, or launched using the Application h elper method Context.showAlert( . See the section after this table for more details.
Activity
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if (messageCount > 0) { nm.notifyWithText(myApp.NOTIFICATION_GUID, // ID for this notification. messageCount + " new message" + mes sageCount > 1 ? "s":"", // Text to display. NotificationManager.LENGTH_SHORT); // Show it for a short time only. } } To display a notification in the status bar and have it launch an intent when the user selects it (such as the new text message notification does , call NotificationManager.notify( , and pass in vibration patterns, status bar icons, or Intents to associate with the notification.
Displaying a Progress Bar

An activity can display a progress bar to notify the user that something is happening. To display a progress bar in a screen, call Activity.requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_PROGRESS . To set the value of the progress bar, call Activity.getWindow( .setFeatureInt(Window.FEATURE_PROGRESS, level . Progress bar values are from 0 to 9,999, or set the value to 10,000 to make the progress bar invisible. You can also use the ProgressDialog class, which enables a dialog box with an embedded progress b ar to send a "I'm working on it" notification to the user.
Adding Your Application to the Favorites List

You can't. Only a user can add an application to the Favorites list.
Adding Items to the Screen Menu

Every Android screen has a default menu with default options, such as adding the activity to the favorites menu. You can add your own menu entries to the default menu options by implementing Activity.onCreateOptionsMenu or Activity.onPrepareOptionsMenu( , and adding Item objects to the Menu passed in. To handle clicks implement Activity.onOptionsItemSelected( to handle the click in your Activity class. You may also pass the Item object a handler class that implements the Runnable class (a handler but this is less efficient and discouraged. An application receives a callback at startup time to enable it to populate its menu. Additionally, it receives callbacks each time the user displays the options menu to let you perform some contextual modifications on the menu. To populate the menu on startup, override Activity.onCreateOptionsMenu; to populate it when the menu is called (somewhat less efficient , you can override Activity.onPrepareOptionsMenu( . Each Activity has its own menu list. Menu items are displayed in the order added, though you can g roup them as described in the Menu.add documentation. The following code snippet adds three items to the default menu options and handles them through the overridden Activity.onOptionsItemSelected( method. You can show or hide menu items by calling setItemShown( or setGroupShown( .
// Called only the first time the options menu is d isplayed. // Create the menu entries. // Menu adds items in the order shown. @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu); // Parameters for menu.add are: // group -- Not used here. // id -- Used only when you want to handle and identify the click yourself. // title menu.add(0, 0, "Zoom"); menu.add(0, 1, "Settings"); menu.add(0, 2, "Other");
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example, suppose you implement a new image handling tool that shrinks an image to a smaller size and you would like to offer this as a menu option to any other Activity that handles pictures. To do this, you would exposes your capabilities inside an intent filter in your manifest. If another application that handles photos asks Android for any Activities that can perform actions on pictures, Android will perform intent resolution, find your Activity, and add it to the other Activity's options menu.
The offering application

The application offering the service must include an <intent-filter> element in the manifest, inside the <activity> tag of the offering Activity. The intent filter includes all the details describing what it can do, such as a <type> element that describes the MIME type of data that it can handle, a custom <action> value that describes what your handling application can do (this is so that when it receives the Intent on opening it knows what it is expected to do , and most important, include a <category> filter with the value android.intent.category.ALTERNATIVE and/or android.intent.category.SELECTED_ALTERNATIVE (SELECTED_ALTERNATIVE is used to handle only the currently selected element on the screen, rather than the whole Activity intent. Here's an example of a snip of a manifest that advertises picture shrinking technology for both selected items and the whole screen. <activity class="PictureShrink"> <! -- Handling class --> <intent-filter label="Shrink picture"> <!- - Menu label to display --> <action value="com.example.sampleapp.SHRINK _IT" /> <type value="image/*" /> <! -- MIME type for generic images --> <category value="android.intent.category.AL TERNATIVE " /> <category value="android.intent.category.SE LECTED_ALTERNATIVE" /> </intent-filter> </activity>
The menu-displaying application

An application that wants to display a menu that includes any additional external services must, first of all, handle its menu creation callback. As part of that callback it creates an intent with the category Intent.ALTERNATIVE_CATEGORY and/or Intent.SELECTED_ALTERNATIVE, the MIME type currently selected, and any other requirements, the same way as it would satisfy an intent filter to open a new Activity. It then calls menu.addIntentOptions( to have Android search for and add a ny services meeting those requirements. It can optionally add addit ional custom menu items of its own. You should implement SELECTED_ALTERNATIVE in onPrepareOptionsMenu( rath er than onCreateOptionsMenu( , because the user's selection can change after the application is launched. Here's a code snippet demonstrating how a picture application would search for additional services to display on its menu. @Override public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu){ super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu); // Create an Intent that describes the requirem ents to fulfill to be included // in our menu. The offering app must include a category value of Intent.ALTERNATIVE_CATEGORY. Intent intent = new Intent(null, getIntent().ge tData()); intent.addCategory(Intent.ALTERNATIVE_CATEGORY) ; // Search for, and populate the menu with, acce ptable offering applications. menu.addIntentOptions( 0, // Group 0, // Any unique IDs we might care to add. MySampleClass.class.getName(), // Name of the class displaying the menu--here, its this class. null, // No specifics. intent, // Previously created intent that describes our requirements. 0, // No flags. null); // No specifics. return true; }
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The following outline illustrates a typical implementation public class MyActivity extends Activity { [ . . . ] // Need handler for callbacks to the UI thread final Handler mHandler = new Handler(); // Create runnable for posting final Runnable mUpdateResults = new Runnable() { public void run() { updateResultsInUi(); } }; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); [ . . . ] } protected void startLongRunningOperation() { // Fire off a thread to do some work that w e shouldn't do directly in the UI thread Thread t = new Thread() { public void run() { mResults = doSomethingExpensive(); mHandler.post(mUpdateResults); } }; t.start(); } private void updateResultsInUi() { // Back in the UI thread -- update our UI e lements based on the data in mResults [ . . . ] } } For further discussions on this topic, see Developing Responsive Applications and the Handler documentation.
Selecting, Highlighting, or Styling Portions of Text

You can highlight or style the formatting of strings or substrings of text in a TextView object. There are two ways to do this If you use a string resource, you can add some simple styling, such as bold or italic using HTML notation. So, for example, in res/values/strings.xml you could declare this <resource> <string>id="@+id/styled_welcome_message">We are <b><i>so</i></b> glad to see you.</string> </resources> To style text on the fly, or to add highlighting or more complex styling, you must use the Spannable object as described next. To style text on the fly, you must make sure the TextView is using Spannable storage for the text (this will always be true if the TextView is an EditText , retrieve its text with getText( , and call setSpan(Object, int, int, int , passing in a new style class
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Lifecycle of an Android Application

In most cases, every Android application runs in its own Linux process. This process is created for the application when some of its code needs to be run, and will remain running until it is no longer needed and the system needs to reclaim its memory for use by other applications. An important and unusual feature of Android is that an application process's lifetime is not directly controlled by the application itself. Instead, it is determined by the system through a combination of the parts of the application that the system knows are running, how important these things are to the user, and how much overall memory is available in the system. It is important that application developers understand how different application components (in particular Activity, Service, and IntentReceiver impact the lifetime of the application's process. Not using these components correctly can result in the system killing the application's process while it is doing important work. A common example of a process lifecycle bug is an IntentReceiver that starts a thread when it receives an Intent in its onReceiveIntent( method, and then returns from the function. Once it returns, the system considers that IntentReceiver to be no longer active, and thus its hosting process no longer needed (unless other application components are active in it . Thus, it may kill the process at any time to reclaim memory, terminating the spawned thread that is running in it. The solution to this problem is to start a Service from the IntentReceiver, so the system knows that there is still active work being done in the process. To determine which processes should be killed when low on memory, Android places them into an "importance hierarchy" based on the components running in them and the state of those components. These are, in order of importance: 1. A foreground process is one holding an Activity at the top of the screen that the user is interacting with (its onResume( method has been called or an IntentReceiver that is currently running (its onReceiveIntent( method is executing . There will only ever be a few such processes in the system, and these will only be killed as a last resort if memory is so low that not even these processes can continue to run. Generally at this point the device has reached a memory paging state, so this action is required in order to keep the user interface responsive. 2. A visible process is one holding an Activity that is visible to the user on-screen but not in the foreground (its onPause( method has been called . This may occur, for example, if the foreground activity has been displayed with a dialog appearance that allows the previous activity to be see n behind it. Such a process is considered extremely important and will not be killed unless doing so is required to keep all foreground processes running. 3. A service process is one holding a Service that has been started with the startService( method. Though these processes are not directly visible to the user, they are generally doing things that the user cares about (such as background mp3 playback or background network data upload or down load , so the system will always keep such processes running unless there is not enough memory to retain all foreground and visible process. . A background process is one holding an Activity that is not currently visible to the user (its onStop( method has been called . These processes have no direct impact on the user experience. Provided they implement their activity lifecycle correctly (see Activity for more details , the system can kill such processes at any time to reclaim memory for one of the three previous processes types. Usually there are many of these processes running, so they are kept in an LRU list to ensure the process that was most recently seen by the user is the last to be killed when running low on memory. . An empty process is one that doesn't hold any active application components. The only reason to keep such a process around is as a cache to improve startup time the next time a component of its application needs to run. As such, the system will often kill these processes in order to balance overall system resources between these empty cached processes and the underlying kernel caches. When deciding how to classify a process, the system picks the most important level of all the components currently active in the process. See the Activity, Service, and IntentReceiver documentation for more detail on how each of these components contribute to the overall lifecycle of a process. The documentation for each of these classes describes in more detail how they impact the overall lifecycle of their application.
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Android Emulator
The Android SDK includes a mobile device emulator a virtual device that runs on your computer. The emulator lets you prototype, develop, and test Android applications without using a physical device. The Android emulator mimics all of the typical functions and behaviors of a mobile device, except that it can not receive or place phone calls. As shown at right, the emulator provides a variety of navigation and control keys, which you can "press" using your mouse or keyboard to generate events for your application. It also provides a screen in which your applicatio n is displayed, together with any other Android applications running. To help you model and test your application, the emulator lets your application use the services of the Android platform to invoke other applications, access the network, play audio and video, store and retrieve data, notify the user, and render graphical transitions and themes. The emulator also includes a variety of debug capabilities, such as a console from which you can log kernel output, simulate application interrupts such as arriving SMS messages or phone calls), and simulate latency effects and dropouts on the data channel. The sections below provide more information about the emulator and how to use it when developing your applications.
Contents
Starting and Stopping the Emulator Controlling the Emulator Emulator Startup Options Using the Emulator Console Port Redirections Network Status Network Delay Emulation Network Speed Emulation Telephony Emulation Using Emulator Skins Running Multiple Instances of the Emulator Installing Applications on the Emulator SD Card Emulation Creating a Disk Image Copying Files to a Disk Image Loading the Disk Image at Emulator Startup Troubleshooting Emulator Problems Emulator Limitations
Starting and Stopping the Emulator

To start the emulator, change to the tools/ folder of the SDK and enter emulator or ./emulator. This initializes the Android system and you will see the emulator window appear on your screen. To stop the emulator, close the emulator window.
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Category Help
Option -help
Description Print a list of all emulator commands. Use <file> as the working user-data disk image.
Comments
Data
-data [file]
If -data is not used, the emulator looks for a file named "userdata.img" in ~/.android Linux/Mac) or C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Android Windows). If you use -data <file> but <file> does not exist, the emulator creates a file at that location.
-ramdisk <file>
Use <file> as the ramdisk image. Use <file> as the SD card image. Wipe all data on the user disk image see -data) before starting. Enable console shell on the current terminal. Send kernel output to the console. Enable logcat output with given tags.
Default value is <system>/ramdisk.img
-sdcard <file>
Default value is <system>/sdcard.img
-wipe-data
Debug
-console
-debug-kernel
-logcat <logtags>
If the environment variable ANDROID_LOG_TAGS is defined and not empty, its value will be used to enable logcat output by default
-trace <name>
Enable code profiling press F9 to start). Enable verbose output. Enable verbose key presses. Use device or WAV file for audio input. Disable Android audio support. Redirect radio modem interface to a host character device. Enable Android audio support. Set network latency emulation to <delay>. Disabled by default. Default value is none. See the table in Network Delay Emulation for supported Set by default.
-verbose -verbosekeys Media -mic <device or file> -noaudio -radio <device>
-useaudio Network -netdelay <delay>
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console and use the netstatus command. Here's an example of the command and its output. network status
Network Delay Emulation

The emulator lets you simulate various network latency levels, so that you can test your applicaton in an environment more typical of the actual conditions in which it will run. You can set a latency level or range at emulator startup or you can use the console to change the latency dynamically, while the applicat ion is running in the emulator. To set latency at emulator startup, use the -netdelay emulator option with a supported <delay> value, as listed in the table below. Here are some examples: emulator -netdelay gprs emulator -netdelay 40 100 To make dynamic changes to network delay while the emulator is running, connect to the console and use the netdelay command with a supported <delay> value from the table below. network delay gprs The format of network is one of the following numbers are milliseconds): Value gprs edge umts none <num> Description GPRS EDGE/EGPRS UMTS/3G No latency Emulate an exact latency milliseconds). Emulate an specified latency range min, max milliseconds). Comments min 150, max 550) min 80, max 400) min 35, max 200) min 0, max 0)
<min>:<max>
Network Speed Emulation

The emulator also lets you simulate various network transfer rates. You can set a transfer rate or range at emulator startup or you can use the console to change the rate dynamically, while the application is running in the emulator. To set the network speed at emulator startup, use the -netspeed emulator option with a supported <speed> value, as listed in the table below. Here are some examples: emulator -netspeed gsm emulator -netspeed 14.4 80 To make dynamic changes to network speed while the emulator is running, connect to the console and use the netspeed command with a supported <speed> value from the table below. network speed 14.4 80 The format of network <speed> is one of the following numbers are kilobits/sec):
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Using Emulator Skins

You can run the emulator with any of four default skins, as described in the table below. To specify a skin, use -skin <skinID> when starting the emulator. For example: emulator -skin HVGA-L Note that you must enter the in uppercase letters if your development computer is case-sensitive). skinID QVGA-L Description 320x240, landscape default) Skin
QVGA-P
240x320, portrait
HVGA-L
480x320, landscape
HVGA-P
320x480, portrait
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Troubleshooting Emulator Problems

The adb utility sees the emulator as an actual physical device. For this reason, you might have to use the -d flag with some common adb commands, such as install. The -d flag lets you specify which of several connected devices to use as the target of a command. If you don't specify -d, the emulator will target the first device in its list. For more information about adb, see Android Debug Bridge. For emulators running on Mac OS X, if you see an error "Warning: No DNS servers found" when starting the emulator, check to see whether you have an /etc/resolv.conf file. If not, please run the following line in a command window: ln -s /private/var/run/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf See Frequently Asked Questions for more troubleshooting information.
Emulator Limitations
In this release, the limitations of the emulator include: No support for placing or receiving actual phone calls. You can simulate phone calls placed and received) through the emulator console, however. No support for USB connections No support for camera/video capture input). No support for audio input capture). Output playback) is supported. No support for device-attached headphones No support for determining connected state No support for determining battery charge level and AC charging state No support for determining SD card insert/eject No support for Bluetooth
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Hierarchy of Screen Elements

The basic functional unit of an Android application is the activity--an object of the class android.app.Activity. An activity can do many things, but by itself it does not have a presence on the screen. To give your activity a screen presence and design its UI, you work with views and viewgroups -- basic units of user interface expression on the Android platform.
Views
A view is an object of base class android.view.View. It's a data structure whose properties store the layout and content for a specific rectangular area of the screen. A View object handles measuring and layout, drawing, focus change, scrolling, and key/gestures for the screen area it represents. The View class serves as a base class for widgets -- a set of fully implemented subclasses that draw interactive screen elements. Widgets handle their own measuring and drawing, so you can use them to build your UI more quickly. The list of widgets available includes Text, EditText, InputMethod, MovementMethod, Button, RadioButton, Checkbox, and ScrollView.
Viewgroups
A viewgroup is an object of class android.view.Viewgroup. As its name indicates, a viewgroup is a special type of view object whose function is to contain and manage a subordinate set of views and other viewgroups, Viewgroups let you add structure to your UI and build up complex screen elements that can be addressed as a single entity. The Viewgroup class serves as a base class for layouts -- a set of fully implemented subclasses that provide common types of screen layout. The layouts give you a way to build a structure for a set of views.
A Tree-Structured UI
On the Android platform, you define an Activity's UI using a tree of view and viewgroup nodes, as shown in the diagram below. The tree can be as simple or complex as you need to make it, and you can build it up using Android's set of predefined widgets and layouts or custom view types that you create yourself.
To attach the tree to the screen for rendering, your Activity calls its setContentView() method and passes a reference to the root node object. Once the Android system has the reference to the root node object, it can work directly with the node to invalidate, measure, and draw the tree. When your Activity becomes active and receives focus, the system notifies your activity and requests the root node to measure and draw the tree. The root node then requests that its child nodes draw themselves -- in turn, each viewgroup node in the tree is responsible for drawing its direct children. As mentioned previously, each view group has the responsibility of measuring its available space, laying out its children, and calling Draw() on each child to let it render itself. The children may request a size and location in the parent, but the parent object has the final decision on where how big each child can be.
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The following two forms represent a LinearLayout with a set of elements: a button, some labels, some text boxes. Both have padding values to adjust the padding nicely. The text boxes have their width set to FILL_PARENT; other elements are set to WRAP_CONTENT. The gravity, by default, is left. The form on the left has weight values unset (0 by default); the form on the right has the comments text box weight set to 1. If the Name textbox had also been set be the same height.
Tip: To create a proportionate size layout on the screen, create a container object that is fill_parent, assign the children heights or widths of zero, and then assign relative weight values to each child, depending on what proportion of the screen each should take. to 1, the Name and Comments text boxes would
Within a horizontal LinearLayout, items are aligned by the position of their text base line (the first line of the first list element topmost or leftmost is considered the reference line). This is so that people scanning elements in a form shouldn't have to jump up and down to read element text in neighboring elements. This can be turned off by setting android:baselineAligned="false" in the layout XML.
TableLayout
TableLayout positions its children into rows and columns. A TableLayout consists of a number of TableRow objects, each defining a row (actually, you can have other children, which will be explained below). TableLayout containers do not display border lines for their rows, columns, or cells. Each row has zero or more cells; each cell can hold one View object. The table has as many columns as the row with the most cells. A table can leave cells empty. Cells cannot span columns, as they can in HTML. The following image shows a table layout, with the invisible cell borders displayed as dotted lines.
Columns can be hidden, can be marked to stretch to fill available screen space, or can be marked as shrinkable to force the column to shrink until the table fits the screen. See the reference documentation for this class for more details.
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Summary of Important View Groups

These objects all hold child UI elements. Some provide visible UI, and others only handle child layout. Class AbsoluteLayout Description Enables you to specify the location of child objects relative to the parent in exact measurements (for example, pixels). Layout that acts as a view frame to display a single object. A horizontal scrolling display of images, from a bound list. Displays a scrolling grid of m columns and n rows. A layout that organizes its children into a single horizontal or vertical row. It creates a scrollbar if the length of the window exceeds the length of the screen. Displays a scrolling single column list.
FrameLayout Gallery GridView LinearLayout
ListView
Working with AdapterViews (Binding to Data)

As we mentioned, some view groups have UI. These objects typically subclass AdapterView. Examples include such as Gallery (an image selection widget) and ListView (a list of views). These objects have two jobs in common: Filling the layout with data Handling user selections
Filling the layout with data

This is typically done by binding the class to an Adapter that gets its data from somewhere either a list that the code supplies, or query results from the device's database. // Get a Spinner and bind it to an ArrayAdapter that // references a String array. private String[] fruit = {"apples", "oranges", "lemons"} Spinner s1 = (Spinner)findViewById(R.id.fruitlist); s1.setAdapter(new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, R.layout.spinner_1, mStrings)); // Load a Spinner and bind it to a data query. private String[] cols={android.provider.Contacts.PeopleColumns.NAME}; private Cursor cur = managedQuery(android.provider.Contacts.People.CONTENT_URI, cols, null, null); s2.setAdapter(new CursorAdapter(cur, this));
Handling user selections

This is done by setting the class's AdapterView.OnItemClickListener member to a listener and catching the selection changes. // Create a message handling object as an anonymous class. private OnItemClickListener mMessageClickedHandler = new OnItemClickListener() { public void onItemClick(AdapterView parent, View v, int position, long id) { // Display a messagebox. showAlert("You've got an event", "Clicked me!", "ok", false); } }; // Now hook into our object and set its onItemClickListener member // to our class handler object. mHistoryView = (ListView)findViewById(R.id.history); mHistoryView.setOnItemClickListener(mMessageClickedHandler);
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Loading the XML Resource

Loading the compiled layout resource is very easy, and done with a single call in the application's onCreate() method, as shown here: protected void onCreate(Bundle savedValues) { // Be sure to call the super class. super.onCreate(savedValues); // Load the compiled layout resource into the wi ndow's // default ViewGroup. // The source file is res/layout/hello_activity. xml setContentView(R.layout.hello_activity); // Retrieve any important stored values. restoreValues(savedValues); }
Hooking into a Screen Element

You can get a handle to a screen element by calling Activity.findViewById. You can use this handle to set or retrieve any values exposed by the object. TextView msgTextView = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.msg); msgTextView.setText(R.string.push_me);
Listening for UI Notifications

Some UI notifications are automatically exposed and called by Android. For instance, Activity exposes overrideable methods onKeyDown and onKeyUp, and Widget exposes onFocusChanged(boolean, int) . However, some important callbacks, such as button clicks, are not exposed natively, and must be registered for manually, as shown here. public class SendResult extends Activity { /** * Initialization of the Screen after it is first created. * call setContentView() to * describe what is to be displayed in the screen. */ protected void onCreate(Bundle savedValues) { ... // Listen for button clicks. Button button = (Button)findViewById(R.id.corky); button.setOnClickListener(mCorkyListener); } // Create an anonymous class to act as a button click listener. private OnClickListener mCorkyListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { // To send a result, simply call setResult() before your // activity is finished. setResult(RESULT_OK, "Corky!"); finish(); } };
Must at least
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Panel A panel is a concept not backed by a specific class. It is a View of some sort that is tied in closely to a parent window, but can handle clicks and perform simple functions related to its parent. A panel floats in front of its parent, and is positioned relative to it. A common example of a panel (implemented by Android) is the options menu available to every screen. At present, there are no specific classes or methods for creating a panel it's more of a general idea. Dialog A dialog is a floating window that can have buttons, and acts as a lightweight form that is intended to, at most, perform a simple action (such as click a button) and perhaps return a value. It is not intended to persist in the history stack, contain complex layout, or perform complex actions. Android provides a default simple dialog for you with optional buttons, though you can define a dialog layout yourself. The base class is Dialog, and the helper methods to open a dialog box are the various Activity.showAlert() methods. Window An abstract class that specifies the elements of a generic window, such as the look and feel (title bar text, location and content of menus, and so on). Dialog and Activity use an implementation of this class to render a window. You should not need to implement this class. Surface A block of memory that gets composited to the screen. A Surface holds a Canvas object for drawing, and provides various helper methods to draw layers and resize the surface. You should not use this class directly; use SurfaceView instead. SurfaceView A View object that wraps a Surface for drawing, and exposes methods to specify its size and format dynamically. The camera app uses SurfaceView for its preview screen. A SurfaceView provides a way to draw independently of the UI thread for resource-intense operations (such as games or camera previews), but it uses extra memory as a result. SurfaceView supports both Canvas and OpenGL ES graphics. Canvas A drawing surface where the actual bits are composited. It has methods for standard computer drawing of bitmaps, lines, circles, rectangles, text, and so on. It is bound to a Bitmap or Surface. Canvas is the simplest, easiest way to draw 2D objects on the screen. However, it does not support hardware acceleration, as OpenGL ES does. OpenGL ES Android provides OpenGL ES libraries that you can use for fast, complex 3D images. It is much harder to use than a Canvas object, but better for 3D objects. The graphics.glutils package exposes OpenGL ES functionality.
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The AndroidManifest.xml File

AndroidManifest.xml is a required file for every application. It sits in the root folder for an application, and describes global values for your package, including the application components (activities, services, etc) that the package exposes and the implementation classes for each component, what kind of data each can handle, and where they can be launched. An important aspect of this file are the intent filters that it includes. These filters describe where and when that activity can be started. When an activity (or the operating system) wants to perform an action such as open a Web page or open a contact picker screen, it creates an Intent object. This object can hold several descriptors describing what you want to do, what data you want to do it to, the type of data, and other bits of information. Android compares the information in an Intent object with the intent filter exposed by every application and finds the activity most appropriate to handle the data or action specified by the caller. More details on intents is given in the Intent reference page. Besides declaring your application's Activities, Content Providers, Services, and Intent Receivers, you can also specify permissions and instrumentation (security control and testing) in AndroidManifest.xml. For a reference of the tags and their attributes, please see AndroidManifest. A simple AndroidManifest.xml looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.my_domain.app.helloactivity"> <application android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity class=".HelloActivity"> <intent-filter> <action android:value="android.intent.action.MAIN"/> <category android:value="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/> </intent-filter> </activity> </application> </manifest> Some general items to note: Almost every AndroidManifest.xml (as well as many other Android XML files) will include the namespace declaration xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" in its first element. This makes a variety of standard Android attributes available in the file, which will be used to supply most of the data for elements in that file. Most manifests include a single <application> element, which defines all of the application-level components and properties that are available in the package. Any package that will be presented to the user as a top-level application available from the program launcher will need to include at least one Activity component that supports the MAIN action and LAUNCHER category as shown here. Here is a detailed outline of the structure of an AndroidManifest.xml file, describing all tags that are available. <manifest> The root node of the file, describing the complete contents of the package. Under it you can place: <uses-permission> Requests a security permission that your package must be granted in order for it to operate correctly. See the Security Model document for more information on permissions. A manifest can contain zero or more of these elements.
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Storing, Retrieving and Exposing Data

A typical desktop operating system provides a common file system that any application can use to store and read files that can be read by other applications (perhaps with some access control settings . Android uses a different system: on Android all application data (including files are private to that application. However Android also provides a standard way for an application to expose its private data to other applications. This section describes the many ways that an application can store and retrieve data expose its data to other applications and also how you can request data from other applications that expose their data. Android provides the following mechanisms for storing and retrieving data: Preferences A lightweight mechanism to store and retrieve key value pairs of primitive data types. This is typically used to store application preferences. Files You can store your files on the device or on a removable storage medium. By default other applications cannot access these files. Databases The Android APIs contain support for SQLite. Your application can create and use a private SQLite database. Each database is private to the package that creates it. Content Providers A content provider is a optional component of an application that exposes read write access to an application's private data subject to whatever restrictions it wants to impose. Content providers implement a standard request syntax for data and a standard access mechanism for the returned data. Android supplies a number of content providers for standard data types such as personal contacts. Network Don't forget that you can also use the network to store and retrieve data.
Using Application Preferences

You can store application preferences such as a default greeting or text font to be loaded whenever this application is started. Call Context.getSharedPreferences() to read and write values. Assign a name to your set of preferences if you want to share them with other components in the same package, or use Activity.getPreferences() with no name to keep them private to the calling activity. You cannot share preferences across packages. Here is an example of setting user preferences for silent keypress mode for a calculator. public class Calc extends Activity { public static final String PREFS_NAME = "MyPrefsFile"; ... @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle state){ super.onCreate(state); ... // Restore preferences SharedPreferences settings = getSharedPreferences(PREFS_NAME, 0); boolean silent = settings.getBoolean("silentMode", false); setSilent(silent); } @Override protected void onStop(){ super.onStop(); // Save user preferences. We need an Editor object to // make changes. All objects are from android.context.Context SharedPreferences settings = getSharedPreferences(PREFS_NAME, 0); SharedPreferences.Editor editor = settings.edit(); editor.putBoolean("silentMode", mSilentMode); // Don't forget to commit your edits!!! editor.commit(); } }
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Modifying Data Adding a Record Deleting a Record
Querying for Data

Each contact provider exposes a unique public URI (wrapped by ContentURI) that is used by a client to query/add/update/delete data on that content provider. This URI has two forms: one to indicate all values of that type (e.g., all personal contacts), and one form to indicate a specific record of that type (e.g., Joe Smith's contact information). content://contacts/people/ is the URI that would return a list of all contact names on the device. content://contacts/people/23 is the URI string that would return a single result row, the contact with ID = 23. . An application sends a query to the device that specifies a general type of item (all phone numbers), or a specific item (Bob's phone number), to retrieve. Android then returns a Cursor over a recordset of results, with a specific set of columns. Let's look at a hypothetical query string and a result set (the results have been trimmed a bit for clarity): query = content://contacts/people/ Results: _ID 13 44 45 53 _COUNT 4 4 4 4 NUMBER (425) 555 6677 (212) 555-1234 (212) 555-6657 201.555.4433 NUMBER_KEY 425 555 6677 212 555 1234 212 555 6657 201 555 4433 LABEL California office NY apartment Downtown office Love Nest NAME Bully Pulpit Alan Vain Alan Vain Rex Cars TYPE Work Home Work Home
Note that the query string isn't a standard SQL query string, but instead a URI string that describes the type of data to return. This URI consists of three parts: the string "content://"; a segment that describes what kind of data to retrieve; and finally an optional ID of a specific item of the specified content type. Here are a few more example query strings: content://media/images is the URI string that would return a list of all images on the device. content://contacts/people/ is the URI that would return a list of all contact names on the device. content://contacts/people/23 is the URI string that would return a single result row, the contact with ID = 23. Although there is a general form, query URIs are somewhat arbitrary and confusing. Therefore, Android provides a list of helper classes in the android.provider package that define these query strings so you should not need to know the actual URI value for different data types. These helper classes define a string (actually, a wrapper class called ContentURI) called CONTENT_URI for a specific data type. For instance, android.provider.contacts.People.CONTENT_URI defines the query string used to search for people in Android's built-in people content provider. Typically you will use the defined CONTENT_URI object to make a query. The only time you should need to examine or modify this string is to add an ID value to the end of the URI to retrieve a specific record. So, for example, if you were looking for record 23 in the people contacts, you might run a query as shown here: // Get the base URI for contacts. ContentURI myPerson = new ContentURI(android.provider.Contacts.People.CONTENT_URI.toURI()); // Add the ID of the record I'm looking for (I'd have to know this somehow). myPerson.addId(23); // Query for this record. Cursor cur = managedQuery(myPerson, null, null, null); This query returns a cursor over a database query result set. What columns are returned, what they're called, and what they are named are discussed next. For now, though, know that you can specify that only certain columns be returned, the sort order, and a SQL WHERE clause.
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Reading Retrieved Data The Cursor object retrieved by the query provides access to a recordset of results. If you have queried for a specific record by ID, this set will contain only one value; otherwise, it can contain multiple values. You can read data from specific fields in the record, but you must know the data type of the field, because reading data requires a specialized method for each type of data. (If you call the string reading method on most types of columns, Android will give you the String representation of the data.) The Cursor lets you request the column name from the index, or the index number from the column name. If you are reading binary data, such as an image file, you should call ContentResolver.openOutputStream() on the string content:// URI stored in a column name. The following snippet demonstrates reading the name and phone number from our phone number query: private void getColumnData(Cursor cur){ if(!cur.first()) return; String name; String phoneNumber; int nameColumn = cur.getColumnIndex(android.provider.Contacts.PeopleColumns.NAME); int phoneColumn = cur.getColumnIndex(android.provider.Contacts.PhonesColumns.NUMBER); int pathColumn = cur.getColumnIndex(android.provider.Contacts.PeopleColumns.PHOTO); String imagePath; while (cur.next()) { // Get the field values name = cur.getString(nameColumn); phoneNumber = cur.getString(phoneColumn); imagePath = cur.getString(stringColumn); InputStream is = getContentResolver().openInputStream(imagePath); ... read the file stream into something... is.close() // Do something with the values. ... } } Note that the image field is actually a string path value. Some content provider convenience classes provide helper methods to get specific field values such as files more easily. Remember, whenever calling updating methods on the Cursor class, you must call commitUpdates() to send the changes to the database.
Modifying Data
To update an individual record, set the Cursor to the appropriate object, call the appropriate update... method, and then call commitUpdates(). To batch update a group of records (for example, to change "NY" to "New York" in all contact fields), call the ContentResolver.update() method with the columns and values to change. Remember, whenever calling updating methods on the Cursor class, you must call commitUpdates() to send the changes to the database.
Adding a New Record

To add a new record, call ContentResolver.insert() with the URI of the type of item to add, and a Map of any values you want to set immediately on the new record. This will return the full URI of the new record, including record number, which you can then use to query and get a Cursor over the new record. Remember, whenever calling updating methods on the Cursor class, you must call commitUpdates() to send the changes to the database.
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5. If you are exposing byte data, such as a bitmap file, the field that stores this data should actually be a string field with a content:// URI for that specific file. This is the field that clients will call to retrieve this data. The content provider for that content type (it can be the same content provider or another content provider for example, if you're storing a photo you would use the media content provider) should implement a field named _data for that record. The _data field lists the exact file path on the device for that file. This field is not intended to be read by the client, but by the ContentResolver. The client will call ContentResolver.openOutputStream() on the user-facing field holding the URI for the item (for example, the column named photo might have a value content://media/images/4453). The ContentResolver will request the _data field for that record, and because it has higher permissions than a client, it should be able to access that file directly and return a read wrapper for that file to the client. 6. Declare public static Strings that clients can use to specify which columns to return, or to specify field values from the cursor. Carefully document the data type of each field. Remember that file fields, such as audio or bitmap fields, are typically returned as string path values 7. Return a Cursor object over a recordset in reply to a query. This means implementing the query(), update(), insert(), and delete() methods. As a courtesy, you might want to call ContentResolver.notifyChange() to notify listeners about updated information. 8. Add a <provider> tag to AndroidManifest.xml, and use its authorities attribute to define the authority part of the content type it should handle. For example, if your content type is content://com.example.autos/auto to request a list of all autos, then authorities would be com.example.autos. Set the multiprocess attribute to true if data does not need to be synchronized between multiple running versions of the content provider. 9. If you are handling a new data type, you must define a new MIME type to return for your implementation of android.ContentProvider.getType(url). This type corresponds to the content:// URI submitted to getType(), which will be one of the content types handled by the provider. The MIME type for each content type has two forms: one for a specific record, and one for multiple records. Use the ContentURI methods to help determine what is being requested. Here is the general format for each: vnd.<yourcompanyname>.cursor.item/<contenttype> for a single row. For example: a request for train record 122, using content://com.example.transportationprovider/trains/122, might return the MIME type vnd.example.cursor.item/rail vnd.<yourcompanyname>.cursor.dir/<contenttype> for multiple rows. So, for example, a request for all train records, using content://com.example.transportationprovider/trains might return the MIME type vnd.example.cursor.dir/rail. For an example of a private content provider implementation, see the NodePadProvider class in the notepad sample application that ships with the SDK. Here is a recap of the important parts of a content URI:
A. Standard required prefix. Never modified. B. Authority part. For third-party applications, this should be a fully-qualified class to ensure uniqueness. This corresponds to the value in the <provider> element's authorities attribute: <provider class="TransportationProvider" authorities="com.example.transportationprovider" /> C. The path that the content provider uses to determine what kind of data is being requested. This can be zero or more segments: if the content provider exposes only one type of data (only trains, for example), this can be absent. If it provides several types, including subtypes, this can be several elements long: e.g., "land/bus, land/train, sea/ship, and sea/submarine" to give four possibilities. D. A specific record being requested, if any. This is the _id value of a specific record being requested. If all records of a specific type are being requested, omit this and the trailing slash: content://com.example.transportationprovider/trains
Network Accesses with Android

In addition to all the on-device storage options, you can also store and retrieve data from the network (when available). To do network operations, you'll want to use the following packages: java.net.* android.net.*
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At application install time, permissions requested by the application are granted to it by the package installer, based on checks with trusted authorities and interaction with the user. No checks with the user are done while an application is running: it either was granted a particular permission when installed, and can use that feature as desired, or the permission was not granted and any attempt to use the feature will fail without prompting the user. Often times a permission failure will result in a SecurityException being thrown back to the application. However, this is not guaranteed to occur everywhere. For example, the broadcastIntent(Intent) method checks permissions as data is being delivered to each receiver, after the method call has returned, so you will not receive an exception if there are permission failures. In almost all cases, however, a permission failure will be printed to the system log. The permissions provided by the Android system can be found at Manifest.permission. Any application may also define and enforce its own permissions, so this is not a comprehensive list of all possible permissions. A particular permission may be enforced at a number of places during your program's operation: At the time of a call into the system, to prevent an application from executing certain functions. When starting an activity, to prevent applications from launching activities of other applications. Both sending and receiving Intent broadcasts, to control who can receive your broadcast or who can send a broadcast to you. When accessing and operating on a content provider. Binding or starting a service.
Declaring and Enforcing Permissions

To enforce your own permissions, you must first declare them in your AndroidManifest.xml using one or more <permission> tags. For example, an application that wants to control who can start one of its activities could declare a permission for this operation as follows: <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.google.android.app.myapp" > <permission id="com.google.android.app.myapp.permission.DEADLY_ACTIVITY" android:label="@string/permlab_deadlyActivity" android:description="@string/permdesc_deadlyActivity" /> </manifest> Note that both a label and description should be supplied for the permission. These are string resources that can be displayed to the user when they are viewing a list of permissions (android:label) or details on a single permission ( android:description). The label should be short, a few words describing the key piece of functionality the permission is protecting. The description should be a couple sentences describing what the permission allows a holder to do. Our convention for the description is two sentences, the first describing the permission, the second warning the user of what bad things can happen if an application is granted the permission. Here is an example of a label and description for the CALL_PHONE permission: <string name="permlab_callPhone">Call Phone Numbers</string> <string name="permdesc_callPhone">Allows application to call phone numbers without your intervention. Bad applications may cause unexpected calls on your phone bill.</string>
Enforcing Permissions in AndroidManifest.xml

High-level permissions restricting access to entire components of the system or application can be applied through your AndroidManifest.xml All that this requires is including an android:permission attribute on the desired component, naming the permission that will be used to control access to it. Activity permissions (applied to the <activity tag) restrict who can start the associated activity. The permission is checked during Context.startActivity() and Activity.startSubActivity(); if the caller does not have the required permission then SecurityException is thrown from the call.
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Resources and Internationalization

Resources are external files (that is, non-code files) that are used by your code and compiled into your application at build time. Android supports a number of different kinds of resource files, including XML, PNG, and JPEG files. The XML files have very different formats depending on what they describe. This document describes what kinds of files are supported, and the syntax or format of each. Resources are externalized from source code, and XML files are compiled into a binary, fast loading format for efficiency reasons. Strings, likewise are compressed into a more efficient storage form. It is for these reasons that we have these different resource types in the Android platform. This document contains the following sections: Resources Creating Resources Using Resources Using Resources in Code References to Resources References to Theme Attributes Using System Resources Alternate Resources Resource Reference Terminology Internationalization (I18N) This is a fairly technically dense document, and together with the Resource Reference document, they cover a lot of information about resources. It is not necessary to know this document by heart to use Android, but rather to know that the information is here when you need it.
Resources
This topic includes a terminology list associated with resources, and a series of examples of using resources in code. For a complete guide to the supported Android resource types, see Resources. The Android resource system keeps track of all non-code assets associated with an application. You use the Resources class to access your application's resources; the Resources instance associated with your application can generally be found through Context.getResources(). An application's resources are compiled into the application binary at build time for you by the build system. To use a resource, you must install it correctly in the source tree and build your application. As part of the build process, symbols for each of the resources are generated that you can use in your source code -- this allows the compiler to verify that your application code matches up with the resources you defined. The rest of this section is organized as a tutorial on how to use resources in an application.
Creating Resources
Android supports string, bitmap, and many other types of resource. The syntax and format of each, and where they're stored, depends upon the type of object. In general, though, you create resources from three types of files: XML files (everything but bitmaps and raw), bitmap files(for images) and Raw files (anything else, for example sound files, etc.). In fact, there are two different types of XML file as well, those that get compiled as-is into the package, and those that are used to generate resources by aapt. Here is a list of each resource
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Using Resources
This section describes how to use the resources you've created. It includes the following topics: Using resources in code - How to call resources in your code to instantiate them. Referring to resources from other resources - You can reference resources from other resources. This lets you reuse common resource values inside resources. Supporting Alternate Resources for Alternate Configurations - You can specify different resources to load, depending on the language or display configuration of the host hardware. At compile time, Android generates a class named R that contains resource identifiers to all the resources in your program. This class contains several subclasses, one for each type of resource supported by Android, and for which you provided a resource file. Each class contains one or more identifiers for the compiled resources, that you use in your code to load the resource. Here is a small resource file that contains string, layout (screens or parts of screens), and image resources. Note: the R class is an auto-generated file and is not designed to be edited by hand. It will be automatically re-created as needed when the resources are updated.
package com.google.android.samples; public final class R { public static final class string { public static final int greeting=0x0204000e; public static final int start_button_text =0x02040001; public static final int submit_button_text =0x02040008; public static final int main_screen_title =0x0204000a; }; public static final class layout { public static final int start_screen=0x02070000; public static final int new_user_pane=0x02070001; public static final int select_user_list =0x02070002; }; public static final class drawable { public static final int company_logo=0x02020005; public static final int smiling_cat=0x02020006; public static final int yellow_fade_background =0x02020007; public static final int stretch_button_1 =0x02020008; }; };
Using Resources in Code

Using resources in code is just a matter of knowing the full resource ID and what type of object your resource has been compiled into. Here is the syntax for referring to a resource: R.resource_type.resource_name or android.R.resource_type.resource_name Where resource_type is the R subclass that holds a specific type of resource. resource_name is the name attribute for resources defined in XML files, or the file name (without the extension) for resources defined by other file types. Each type of resource will be added to a specific R subclass, depending on the type of resource it is; to learn which R subclass hosts your compiled resource type, consult the resource reference document. Resources compiled by your own application can be referred to without a package name (simply as R.resource_type.resource_name). Android contains a number of standard resources, such as screen styles and button backgrounds. To refer to these in code, you must qualify them with android, as in android.R.drawable.button_background .
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <EditText id="text" xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:textColor="@ android:color/opaque_red" android:text="Hello, World!" /> As another example, you should always use resource references when supplying strings in a layout file so that they can be localized: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <EditText id="text" xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:textColor="@android:color/opaque_red" android:text="@string/hello_world" /> This facility can also be used to create references between resources. For example, we can create new drawable resources that are aliases for existing images: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <drawable id="my_background">@android:drawable/theme2_background</drawable> </resources>
References to Theme Attributes

Another kind of resource value allows you to reference the value of an attribute in the current theme. This attribute reference can only be used in style resources and XML attributes; it allows you to customize the look of UI elements by changing them to standard variations supplied by the current theme, instead of supplying more concrete values. As an example, we can use this in our layout to set the text color to one of the standard colors defined in the base system theme: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <EditText id="text" xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:textColor="?android:textDisabledColor" android:text="@string/hello_world" /> Note that this is very similar to a resource reference, except we are using an '?' prefix instead of '@'. When you use this markup, you are supplying the name of an attribute resource that will be looked up in the theme -because the resource tool knows that an attribute resource is expected, you do not need to explicitly state the type (which would be ?android:attr/android:textDisabledColor ). Other than using this resource identifier to find the value in the theme instead of raw resources, the name syntax is identical to the '@' format: ?[namespace:]type/name with the type here being optional.
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Android supports several types of qualifiers, with various values for each. Append these to the end of the resource folder name, separated by dashes. You can add multiple qualifiers to each folder name, but they must appear in the order they are listed here. For example, a folder containing drawable resources for a fully specified configuration would look like: MyApp/ res/ drawable-en-rUS-port-160dpi-finger-qwerty-dpad-480x320/ More typically, you will only specify a few specific configuration options that a resource is defined for. You may drop any of the values from the complete list, as long as the remaining values are still in the same order: MyApp/ res/ drawable-en-rUS-finger/ drawable-port/ drawable-port-160dpi/ drawable-qwerty/
Qualifier Language Region
Values The two letter ISO 639-1 language code in lowercase. For example: en, fr, es The two letter ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 language code in uppercase preceded by a lowercase "r". For example: rUS, rFR, rES port, land, square 92dpi, 108dpi, etc. notouch, stylus, finger qwerty, 12key
Screen orientation Screen pixel density Touchscreen type Primary text input method Primary non-touchscreen navigation method Screen dimensions
dpad, trackball, wheel
320x240, 640x480, etc. The larger dimension must be specified first.
This list does not include device-specific parameters such as carrier, branding, device/hardware, or manufacturer. Everything that an application needs to know about the device that it is running on is encoded via the resource qualifiers in the table above. Here are some general guidelines on qualified resource directory names: Values are separated by a dash (as well as a dash after the base directory name) Values are case-sensitive (even though they must be unique across all folder names in a case-insensitive way) For example, A portrait-specific drawable directory must be named drawable-port, not drawable-PORT. You may not have two directories named drawable-port and drawable-PORT, even if you had intended "port" and "PORT" to refer to different parameter values.
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Terminology
The resource system brings a number of different pieces together to form the final complete resource functionality. To help understand the overall system, here are some brief definitions of the core concepts and components you will encounter in using it: Asset: A single blob of data associated with an application. This includes object files compiled from the Java source code, graphics (such as PNG images), XML files, etc. These files are organized in a directory hierarchy that, during final packaging of the application, is bundled together into a single ZIP file. aapt: Android Asset Packaging Tool. The tool that generates the final ZIP file of application assets. In addition to collecting raw assets together, it also parses resource definitions into binary asset data. Resource Table: A special asset that aapt generates for you, describing all of the resources contained in an application/package. This file is accessed for you by the Resources class; it is not touched directly by applications. Resource: An entry in the Resource Table describing a single named value. Broadly, there are two types of resources: primitives and bags. Resource Identifier: In the Resource Table all resources are identified by a unique integer number. In source code (resource descriptions, XML files, Java source code) you can use symbolic names that stand as constants for the actual resource identifier integer. Primitive Resource: All primitive resources can be written as a simple string, using formatting to describe a variety of primitive types included in the resource system: integers, colors, strings, references to other resources, etc. Complex resources, such as bitmaps and XML describes, are stored as a primitive string resource whose value is the path of the underlying Asset holding its actual data. Bag Resource: A special kind of resource entry that, instead of a simple string, holds an arbitrary list of name/value pairs. Each name is itself a resource identifier, and each value can hold the same kinds of string formatted data as a normal resource. Bags also support inheritance: a bag can inherit the values from another bag, selectively replacing or extending them to generate its own contents. Kind: The resource kind is a way to organize resource identifiers for various purposes. For example, drawable resources are used to instantiate Drawable objects, so their data is a primitive resource containing either a color constant or string path to a bitmap or XML asset. Other common resource kinds are string (localized string primitives), color (color primitives), layout (a string path to an XML asset describing a view layout), and style (a bag resource describing user interface attributes). There is also a standard "attr" resource kind, which defines the resource identifiers to be used for naming bag items and XML attributes Style: The name of the resource kind containing bags that are used to supply a set of user interface attributes. For example, a TextView class may be given a style resource that defines its text size, color, and alignment. In a layout XML file, you associate a style with a bag using the "style" attribute, whose value is the name of the style resource. Style Class: Specifies a related set of attribute resources. This data is not placed in the resource table itself, but used to generate constants in the source code that make it easier for you to retrieve values out of a style resource and/or XML tag's attributes. For example, the Android platform defines a "View" style class that contains all of the standard view attributes: padding, visibility, background, etc.; when View is inflated it uses this style class to retrieve those values from the XML file (at which point style and theme information is applied as approriate) and load them into its instance. Configuration: For any particular resource identifier, there may be multiple different available values depending on the current configuration. The configuration includes the locale (language and country), screen orientation, screen density, etc. The current configuration is used to select which resource values are in effect when the resource table is loaded.
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Android Developer Toolbox

If you've read Getting Started and Developing Apps, then you know how to build an Android application. (If you haven't read those sections you should now.) Android is a large system though, and there's a lot to learn. The best apps always make the most of the system's features. The links below tell you how to write code that bends the system to your will, allowing you to create cool custom components and do amazing things with the many available APIs. Design Philosophy A manifesto explaining a technical philosophy and perspective that Android developers will find useful. By reading this page, you'll learn how to write applications that perform well on embedded devices (such as phone handsets), and that play nicely with other parts of the system. Building Custom Components Explains how to create custom Android components, such as Views, Services, and Content Providers. Read this, and you'll soon be knocking out great-looking, efficient, and useful components. You can use these to make your own application great, or you can share them with other applications. Optional APIs Describes the APIs that provide access to optional Android components, such as GPS and BlueTooth. Android aims to be more than just another OS, and so the system supports all the features you could hope for in a phone. This section will show you how to use the Location-Based Services (such as GPS, compass, etc.), OpenGL 3D graphics, Bluetooth, and accelerometer. Note that the APIs described in this section are all optional; if your application truly requires one of these APIs, you should be sure that it fails gracefully if the features are not present on a given phone. Google APIs and Services Describes how to use the APIs for accessing Google services that are installed on many Android devices.
Android Application Design Philosophy

The process of learning how to build applications for a new API is pretty similar, even if the platforms themselves are wildly different. Generally, there are two phases: first, you learn how to use the APIs to do what you want to do; later, you learn the nuances of the platform. Put another way, first you learn how you can build applications; later, you learn how you should build them. That second phase learning the right way to build applications can often take a long time, and frequently means "paying your dues", making mistakes, and learning from them. Well, that's not a very efficient process, so this page and the links below aim to give you a helping hand. Before we dive into it, a quick word. Successful applications will offer an outstanding end-user experience. While the Android team has built a robust core system, the vast majority of the user experience will come from users interacting with your applications. As a result, we encourage you to take the time to build an outstanding user experience. An outstanding user experience has three key characteristics: it is fast; it is responsive; and it is seamless. Of course every platform since the dawn of computing has probably cited those same three qualities at one time or another. However, each platform achieves them in different ways; the information below explains how your apps can achieve them on Android.
Fast
An Android application should be fast. Well, it's probably more accurate to say that it should be efficient. There is a tendency in the computing world these days to assume that Moore's Law will solve all our problems eventually. When it comes to embedded applications, though, Moore's Law is a bit more complicated. Moore's Law doesn't really apply to mobile devices in the same way as to desktop and server applications. Moore's Law is actually a law about transistor density that is, it says that you can pack more circuitry into a given chip size, over time. For desktop and server applications, this means you can pack more "speed" into a chip of roughly the same size, resulting in the well-known performance increases. For embedded applications like cell phones, however, Moore's Law is usually exploited to make chips smaller. That is, the tendency is to use the increased density to make the same chip smaller and consume less power, to make phones smaller and make batteries last longer. As a result, embedded devices like phones are increasing in actual, raw speed much more slowly than desktop systems. For embedded devices, Moore's Law means more features and better battery life; increased speed is only an afterthought.
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When Good Applications Go Bad

In Android, application responsiveness is monitored by the Activity Manager and Window Manager system services. Android will display the ANR dialog for a particular application when it detects one of the following conditions: no response to an input event (e.g. key press, screen touch) within 5 seconds an IntentReceiver hasn't finished executing within 10 seconds
Avoiding ANR
Given the above definition for ANR, let's examine why this can occur in Android applications and how best to structure your application to avoid ANR. Android applications normally run entirely on a single (i.e. main) thread. This means that anything your application is doing in the main thread that takes a long time to complete can trigger the ANR dialog because your application is not giving itself a chance to handle the input event or Intent broadcast. Therefore any method that runs in the main thread should do as little work as possible. In particular, Activities should do as little as possible to set up in key lifecycle methods such as onCreate() and onResume(). Potentially long running operations such as network or database operations, or computationally expensive calculations such as resizing bitmaps should be done in a child thread (or in the case of databases operations, via an asynchronous request). However, this does not mean that your main thread should block while waiting for the child thread to complete nor should you call Thread.wait() or Thread.sleep(). Instead of blocking while waiting for a child thread to complete, your main thread should provide a Handler for child threads to post back to upon completion. Designing your application in this way will allow your main thread to remain responsive to input and thus avoid ANR dialogs caused by the 5 second input event timeout. These same practices should be followed for any other threads that display UI, as they are also subject to the same timeouts. The specific constraint on IntentReciever execution time emphasizes what they were meant to do: small, discrete amounts of work in the background such as saving a setting or registering a Notification. So as with other methods called in the main thread, applications should avoid potentially long-running operations or calculations in IntentReceivers. But instead of doing intensive tasks via child threads (as the life of an IntentReceiver is short), your application should start a Service if a potentially long running action needs to be taken in response to an Intent broadcast. As a side note, you should also avoid starting an Activity from an Intent Receiver, as it will spawn a new screen that will steal focus from whatever application the user is currently has running. If your application has something to show the user in response to an Intent broadcast, it should do so using the Notification Manager.
Reinforcing Responsiveness
Generally, 100 to 200ms is the threshold beyond which users will perceive lag (or lack of "snappiness," if you will) in an application. As such, here are some additional tips beyond what you should do to avoid ANR that will help make your application seem responsive to users. If your application is doing work in the background in response to user input, show that progress is being made (ProgressBar and ProgressDialog are useful for this). For games specifically, do calculations for moves in a child thread. If your application has a time-consuming initial setup phase, consider showing a splash screen or rendering the main view as quickly as possible and filling in the information asynchronously. In either case, you should indicate somehow that progress is being made, lest the user perceive that the application is frozen.
Writing Efficient Android Code

There's no way around it: Android devices are embedded devices. Modern handsets may be more like small handheld computers than mere phones these days, but even the fastest, highest-end handset doesn't even come close to the capabilities of even a modest desktop system. That's why it's very important to consider performance when you write Android applications. These systems are not that fast to begin with and they are also constrained by their battery life. This means that there's not a lot of horsepower to spare, so when you write Android code it's important to write it as efficiently as possible. This page describes a number of things that developers can do to make their Android code run more efficiently. By following the tips on this page, you can help make sure your code runs as efficiently as possible.
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Prefer Virtual Over Interface

Suppose you have a HashMap object. You can declare it as a HashMap or as a generic Map: Map myMap1 = new HashMap(); HashMap myMap2 = new HashMap(); Which is better? Conventional wisdom says that you should prefer Map, because it allows you to change the underlying implementation to anything that implements the Map interface. Conventional wisdom is correct for conventional programming, but isn't so great for embedded systems. Calling through an interface reference can take 2x longer than a virtual method call through a concrete reference. If you have chosen a HashMap because it fits what you're doing, there is little value in calling it a Map. Given the availability of IDEs that refactor your code for you, there's not much value in calling it a Map even if you're not sure where the code is headed. (Again, though, public APIs are an exception: a good API usually trumps small performance concerns.)
Prefer Static Over Virtual

If you don't need to access an object's fields, make your method static. It can be called faster, because it doesn't require a virtual method table indirection. It's also good practice, because you can tell from the method signature that calling the method can't alter the object's state.
Avoid Internal Getters/Setters

In native languages like C++ it's common practice to use getters (e.g. i = getCount()) instead of accessing the field directly (i = mCount). This is an excellent habit for C++, because the compiler can usually inline the access, and if you need to restrict or debug field access you can add the code at any time. On Android, this is a bad idea. Virtual method calls are expensive, much more so than instance field lookups. It's reasonable to follow common object-oriented programming practices and have getters and setters in the public interface, but within a class you should always access fields directly.
Cache Field Lookups

Accessing object fields is much slower than accessing local variables. Instead of writing: for (int i = 0; i < this.mCount; i++) dumpItem(this.mItems[i]); You should write: int count = this.mCount; Item[] items = this.mItems; for (int i = 0; i < count; i++) dumpItems(items[i]); (We're using an explicit "this" to make it clear that these are member variables.) A similar guideline is never call a method in the second clause of a "for" statement. For example, the following code will execute the getCount() method once per iteration, which is a huge waste when you could have simply cached the value as an int: for (int i = 0; i < this.getCount(); i++) dumpItems(this.getItem(i));
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However, the following code shows an acceptable use of foreach: public class Foo { int mSplat; static Foo mArray[] = new Foo[27]; public static void zero() { int sum = 0; for (int i = 0; i < mArray.length; i++) { sum += mArray[i].mSplat; } } public static void one() { int sum = 0; Foo[] localArray = mArray; int len = localArray.length; for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) { sum += localArray[i].mSplat; } } public static void two() { int sum = 0; for (Foo a: mArray) { sum += a.mSplat; } } } zero() retrieves the static field twice and gets the array length once for every iteration through the loop. one() pulls everything out into local variables, avoiding the lookups. two() uses the foreach syntax introduced in version 1.5 of the Java programming language. The code generated by the compiler takes care of copying the array reference and the array length to local variables, making it a good choice for walking through all elements of an array. It does generate an extra local load store in the main loop (apparently preserving "a"), making it a teensy bit slower and 4 bytes longer than one(). To summarize all that a bit more clearly: "foreach" syntax performs well with arrays, but be cautious when using it with Iterable objects since there is additional object creation.
Avoid Enums
Enums are very convenient, but unfortunately can be painful when size and speed matter. For example, this: public class Foo { public enum Shrubbery { GROUND, CRAWLING, HANGING } } turns into a 900 byte .class file (Foo$Shubbery.class). On first use, the class initializer invokes the <init> method on objects representing each of the enumerated values. Each object gets its own static field, and the full set is stored in an array (a static field called "$VALUES"). That's a lot of code and data, just for three integers. This: Shrubbery shrub = Shrubbery.GROUND; causes a static field lookup. If "GROUND" were a static final int, the compiler would treat it as a known constant and inline it.
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/*package*/ static int Foo.access$100(Foo foo) { return foo.mValue; } /*package*/ static void Foo.access$200(Foo foo, int value) { foo.doStuff(value); } The inner-class code calls these static methods whenever it needs to access the "mValue" field or invoke the "doStuff" method in the outer class. What this means is that the code above really boils down to a case where you're accessing member fields through accessor methods instead of directly. Earlier we talked about how accessors are slower than direct field accesses, so this is an example of a certain language idiom resulting in an "invisible" performance hit. We can avoid this problem by declaring fields and methods accessed by inner classes to have package scope, rather than private scope. This runs faster and removes the overhead of the generated methods. (Unfortunately it also means the fields could be accessed directly by other classes in the same package, which runs counter to the standard OO practice of making all fields private. Once again, if you're designing a public API you might want to carefully consider using this optimization.)
Avoid Float
Before the release of the Pentium CPU, it was common for game authors to do as much as possible with integer math. With the Pentium, the floating point math co-processor became a built-in feature, and by interleaving integer and floating-point operations your game would actually go faster than it would with purely integer math. The common practice on desktop systems is to use floating point freely. Unfortunately, embedded processors frequently do not have hardware floating point support, so all operations on "float" and "double" are performed in software. Some basic floating point operations can take on the order of a millisecond to complete. Also, even for integers, some chips have hardware multiply but lack hardware divide. In such cases, integer division and modulus operations are performed in software something to think about if you're designing a hash table or doing lots of math.
Some Sample Performance Numbers

To illustrate some of our ideas, here is a table listing the approximate run times for a few basic actions. Note that these values should NOT be taken as absolute numbers: they are a combination of CPU and wall clock time, and will change as improvements are made to the system. However, it is worth noting how these values apply relative to each other for example, adding a member variable currently takes about four times as long as adding a local variable. Action Add a local variable Add a member variable Call String.length() Call empty static native method Call empty static method Call empty virtual method Call empty interface method Call Iterator:next() on a HashMap Call put() on a HashMap Inflate 1 View from XML Inflate 1 LinearLayout containing 1 TextView Inflate 1 LinearLayout containing 6 View objects Inflate 1 LinearLayout containing 6 TextView objects Launch an empty activity
Time 1 4 5 5 12 12.5 15 165 600 22,000 25,000 100,000 135,000 3,000,000
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UI events. For example, when the user presses a key, a key-down event is added to the Activity's main thread's queue. The event handler system needs to dequeue and handle that event quickly; if it doesn't, the system concludes after a few seconds that the application is hung and offers to kill it for the user. If you have long-running code, running it inline in your Activity will run it on the event handler thread, effectively blocking the event handler. This will delay input processing, and result in the ANR dialogs. To avoid this, move your computations to a thread; click here to learn how.
Avoid Huge Activities

Any application worth using will probably have several different screens. When partitioning your UI, be sure to make effective use of Activities. Depending on your development background, you may interpret an Activity as similar to something like a Java Applet, in that it is the entry point for your application. However, that's not quite accurate: where an Applet subclass is the single entry point for a Java Applet, an Activity should be thought of as one of potentially several entry points to your application. The only difference between your "main" Activity and any others you might have is that the "main" one just happens to be the only one that expressed an interest in the "android.intent.action.MAIN" action in your AndroidManifest..xml file. So, when designing your application, think of your application as a federation of Activities. This will make your code a lot more maintainable in the long run, and as a nice side effect also plays nicely with Android's application history and "backstack" model.
Extend Themes
When it comes to the look-and-feel of the user interface, it's important to blend in nicely. Users are jarred by applications which contrast with the user interface they've come to expect. When designing your UIs, you should try and avoid rolling your own as much as possible. Instead, use a Theme. You can override or extend those parts of the theme that you need to, but at least you're starting from the same UI base as all the other applications. For all the details, click here.
Make Being Flexible part of your Resolutions

Different Android devices will sport different resolutions. Some will even be able to change resolutions on the fly, such as by switching to landscape mode. It's important to make sure your layouts and drawables are flexible. Fortunately, this is very easy to do. Check out Implementing a User Interface for the full details, but in brief what you must do is provide different versions of your artwork (if you use any) for the key resolutions, and then design your layout to accommodate various dimensions. (For example, avoid using hard-coded positions and instead use relative layouts.) If you do that much, the system handles the rest, and your application looks great on any device.
Assume the Network is Slow

Android devices will come with a variety of network-connectivity options. All will have some data-access provision, though some will be faster than others. The lowest common denominator, however, is GPRS, the non-3G data service for GSM networks. Even 3G-capable devices will spend lots of time on non-3G networks, so slow networks will remain a reality for quite a long time to come. That's why you should always code your applications to minimize network accesses and bandwidth. You can't assume the network is fast, so you should always plan for it to be slow. If your users happen to be on faster networks, then that's great their experience will only improve. You want to avoid the inverse case though: applications that are usable some of the time, but frustratingly slow the rest based on where the user is at any given moment are likely to be unpopular. One potential gotcha here is that it's very easy to fall into this trap if you're using the emulator, since the emulator uses your desktop computer's network connection. That's almost guaranteed to be much faster than a cell network, so you'll want to change the settings on the emulator that simulate slower network speeds. You can do this in Eclipse, in the "Emulator Settings" tab of your launch configuration or via a command line option when starting the emulator.
Different Keystrokes for Different Folks

Android will support a variety of handset form-factors. That's a fancy way of saying that some Android devices will have full "QWERTY" keyboards, while others will have 40-key, 12-key, or even other key configurations. Similarly, some devices will have touch-screens, but many won't. When building your applications, keep that in mind. Don't make assumptions about specific keyboard layouts -- unless, of course, you're really interested in restricting your application so that it can only be used on those devices.
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Fully Customized Components

Fully customized components can be used to create graphical components that appear however you wish. Perhaps a graphical VU meter that looks like an old analog gauge, or a sing-a-long text view where a bouncing ball moves along the words so you can sing along with a karaoke machine. Either way, you want something that the built-in components just won't do, no matter how you combine them. Fortunately, you can easily create components that look and behave in any way you like, limited perhaps only by your imagination, the size of the screen, and the available processing power (remember that ultimately your application might have to run on something with significantly less power than your desktop workstation). To create a fully customized component: 1. The most generic view you can extend is, unsurprisingly, View, so you will usually start by extending this to create your new super component. 2. You can supply a constructor which can take attributes and parameters from the XML, and you can also consume your own such attributes and parameters (perhaps the color and range of the VU meter, or the width and damping of the needle, etc.) 3. You will probably want to create your own event listeners, property accessors and modifiers, and possibly more sophisticated behavior in your component class as well. 4. You will almost certainly want to override onMeasure() and are also likely to need to override onDraw() if you want the component to show something. While both have default behavior, the default onDraw() will do nothing, and the default onMeasure() will always set a size of 100x100 which is probably not what you want. 5. Other on... methods may also be overridden as required.
onDraw() and onMeasure()

onDraw() delivers you a Canvas upon which you can implement anything you want: 2D graphics, other standard or custom components, styled text, or anything else you can think of. If you want to use 3D graphics, you should extend GLView instead of View, but otherwise the same concepts apply. onMeasure() is a little more involved. onMeasure() is a critical piece of the rendering contract between your component and its container. onMeasure() should be overridden to efficiently and accurately report the measurements of its contained parts. This is made slightly more complex by the requirements of limits from the parent (which are passed in to the onMeasure() method) and by the requirement to call the setMeasuredDimension() method with the measured width and height once they have been calculated. If you fail to call this method from an overridden onMeasure() method, the result will be an exception at measurement time. At a high level, implementing onMeasure() looks something like this: 1. The overridden onMeasure() method is called with width and height measure specifications (widthMeasureSpec and heighMeasureSpec parameters, both are integer codes representing dimensions) which should be treated as requirements for the restrictions on the width and height measurements you should produce. A full reference to the kind of restrictions these specifications can require can be found in the reference documentation under View.onMeasure(int, int) (this reference documentation does a pretty good job of explaining the whole measurement operation as well). 2. Your component's onMeasure() method should calculate a measurement width and height which will be required to render the component. It should try to stay within the specifications passed in, although it can choose to exceed them (in this case, the parent can choose what to do, including clipping, scrolling, throwing an exception, or asking the onMeasure() to try again, perhaps with different measurement specifications). 3. Once the width and height are calculated, the setMeasuredDimension(int width, int height) method must be called with the calculated measurements. Failure to do this will result in an exception being thrown.
A Customized Component Example

The CustomView sample in the API Demos provides an example of a customized component. The custom component is defined in the LabelView class. The LabelView sample demonstrates a number of different aspects of custom components: Extending the View class for a completely custom component. Parameterized constructor that takes the view inflation parameters (parameters defined in the XML). Some of these are passed through to the View superclass, but more importantly, there are some custom attributes defined and used for LabelView.
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Tweaking an Existing Component

There is an even easier option for creating a custom component which is useful in certain circumstances. If there is a component that is already very similar to what you want, you can simply extend that component and just override the behavior that you want to change. You can do all of the things you would do with a fully customized component, but by starting with a more specialized class in the View heirarchy, you can also get a lot of behavior for free that probably does exactly what you want. For example, the SDK includes a NotePad application in the samples. This demonstrates many aspects of using the Android platform, among them is extending an EditText View to make a lined notepad. This is not a perfect example, and the APIs for doing this might change from this early preview, but it does demonstrate the principles. If you haven't done so already, import the NotePad sample into Eclipse (or just look at the source using the link provided). In particular look at the definition of MyEditText in the NoteEditor.java file. Some points to note here 1. The Definition The class is defined with the following line: public static class MyEditText extends EditText It is defined as an inner class within the NoteEditor activity, but it is public so that it could be accessed as NoteEditor.MyEditText from outside of the NoteEditor class if desired. It is static, meaning it does not generate the so-called "synthetic methods" that allow it to access data from the parent class, which in turn means that it really behaves as a separate class rather than something strongly related to NoteEditor. This is a cleaner way to create inner classes if they do not need access to state from the outer class, keeps the generated class small, and allows it to be used easily from other classes. It extends EditText, which is the View we have chosen to customize in this case. When we are finished, the new class will be able to substitute for a normal EditText view. 2. Class Initialization As always, the super is called first. Furthermore, this is not a default constructor, but a parameterized one. The EditText is created with these parameters when it is inflated from an XML layout file, thus, our constructor needs to both take them and pass them to the superclass constructor as well. 3. Overridden Methods In this example, there is only one method to be overridden: onDraw() but there could easily be others needed when you create your own custom components. For the NotePad sample, overriding the onDraw() method allows us to paint the blue lines on the EditText view canvas (the canvas is passed into the overridden onDraw() method). The super.onDraw() method is called before the method ends. The superclass method should be invoked, but in this case, we do it at the end after we have painted the lines we want to include. 4. Use the Custom Component We now have our custom component, but how can we use it? In the NotePad example, the custom component is used directly from the declarative layout, so take a look at note_editor.xml in the res/layout folder. <view xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" class="com.google.android.notepad.NoteEditor$MyEditText" id="@+id/note" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:background="@android:drawable/empty" android:padding="10dip" android:scrollbars="vertical" android:fadingEdge="vertical" /> The custom component is created as a generic view in the XML, and the class is specified using the full package. Note also that the inner class we defined is referenced using the NoteEditor$MyEditText notation which is a standard way to refer to inner classes in the Java programming language.
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Google APIs and Services in Android

Since Android is an open cell phone platform, anyone will be able to build their own devices that run the core Android OS. There is no requirement that any given phone include any Google software, or even be associated with Google at all. However, some groups may choose to license a set of optional user applications from Google that provide convenient developer access to Google services. This will generally be a collection of software included in the base system image and shipped with the phone. Because many devices will include these libraries, for the convenience of developers we're including information about those APIs here. However, please be aware that any APIs you use from the list below may not be available on all Android devices. If the Google software is not present, these libraries and classes will not be present. As a result, if your application uses these APIs, it may not install or run properly on devices that lack the APIs.
MapView
The MapView is an Android View that allows third-party code to display and control a Google Map. This is a complementary offering to the MapActivity provided in the Google Maps application that other Activities can use to display maps of a specific location. The table below summarizes the differences between the two approaches. Feature Embeddable directly into your own Layout? User-controlled navigation? Navigation via code? (i.e. scroll, zoom, etc. from your application code) Can fire events into your own code? MapActivity No (can only set map display) Yes No No MapView Yes Yes Yes Yes
The advantage of using the MapView over the Activity is that it gives you tight integration with your own layout; for instance, you can wrap custom controls around it, or implement fancy input mechanisms (such as using a tilt-sensor to scroll the Map based on how the user tilts the device). The disadvantage of using the MapView is that it requires more code to set up and use; if you simply wish to display a Google Map with the standard UI, it will be much easier to use the Activity.
P2P Services Using XMPP

Applications will frequently need to communicate between devices. For instance, you might wish to send messages back and forth between two devices, to implement an interactive game of checkers. Or, you might develop a social application where you want to send a message to a buddy. One way to do this is to simply send an SMS message to the other phone. It's possible to receive notifications via an IntentReceiver of incoming SMS messages, inspect them to see if they contain data intended for your application, and then consume the message, preventing other applications (and the user) from ever seeing it directly. This works well, but it has two major down-sides: SMS messages can take several minutes to deliver, and they typically cost users money to send and receive. If you built an online game using SMS message-passing, it might very well be both slow and frustrating, and very expensive to your users. As an alternative, Google provides an API that uses the XMPP protocol to pass messages. XMPP includes presence notification, meaning that it provides a convenient way for phones to notify each other when they are online and available for message-passing. It also provides a programmatic model similar to SMS-based message-passing, in that the sender calls a method on a Service to send a message, and the receiver is notified via a broadcast Intent (which it can fetch via an IntentReceiver). However, because XMPP is a persistent socket connection, the response time is much faster than SMS, allowing for a more fluid user experience. The system currently maintains a single XMPP connection to the server, and all XMPP traffic including both standard XMPP instant messages, and this P2P message-passing system is carried on the same connection.
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Android Documentation

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ANDROID DOCUMENTATION

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Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project

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Other Notable Packages

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Here's what each field on this screen means:

Project Name Package Name

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Run the Code: Hello, Android

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Upgrading the UI to an XML Layout

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Debugging Your Project

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Anatomy of an Android Application

Intent and Intent Filters

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Tutorial: A Notepad Application

Who Should Use this Tutorial

Preparing for the Exercises

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Solution and Next Steps

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Tutorial: Notepad Exercise 3

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Solution and Next Steps

Tutorial: Extra Credit

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Implementing Activity Callbacks

Opening a New Screen

Lifetime of the new screen

Listening for Button Clicks

Configuring General Window Properties

Storing and Retrieving State

Other system messages

Listening for phone events

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Displaying a Progress Bar

Adding Your Application to the Favorites List

Adding Items to the Screen Menu

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The offering application

The menu-displaying application

Selecting, Highlighting, or Styling Portions of Text

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Lifecycle of an Android Application

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Starting and Stopping the Emulator

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-verbose -verbosekeys Media -mic <device or file> -noaudio -radio <device>

-useaudio Network -netdelay <delay>

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Network Delay Emulation

Network Speed Emulation

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