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Showing Pop-Up Messages

Sometimes, your activity (or other piece of Android code) will need to speak up. Not every interaction with Android users will be tidy and containable in activities composed of views. Errors will crop up. Background tasks may take much longer than expected. Something asynchronous may occur, such as an incoming message. In these and other cases, you may need to communicate with the user outside the bounds of the traditional UI. Of course, this is nothing new. Error messages in the form of dialog boxes have been around for a very long time. More subtle indicators also existfrom task tray icons to bouncing dock icons to vibrating cell phones. Android has quite a few systems for letting you alert your users outside the bounds of an Activity-based UI. One, notifications, is tied heavily into intents and services and, as such, is covered in Chapter 31. In this chapter, you will learn about two means of raising pop-up messages: toasts and alerts.

Raising Toasts
A Toast is a transient message, meaning that it displays and disappears on its own without user interaction. Moreover, it does not take focus away from the currently active Activity, so if the user is busy writing the next Great Programming Guide, his keystrokes will not be eaten by the message. Since a Toast is transient, you have no way of knowing if the user even notices it. You get no acknowledgment, nor does the message stick around for a long time to pester the user. Hence, the Toast is mostly for advisory messages, such as indicating a longrunning background task is completed, the battery has dropped to a low (but not too low) level, and so on.

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Making a Toast is fairly easy. The Toast class offers a static makeText() that accepts a String (or string resource ID) and returns a Toast instance. The makeText() method also needs the Activity (or other Context) plus a duration. The duration is expressed in the form of the LENGTH_SHORT or LENGTH_LONG constants to indicate, on a relative basis, how long the message should remain visible. If you would prefer your Toast be made out of some other View, rather than be a boring old piece of text, simply create a new Toast instance via the constructor (which takes a Context), and then call setView() to supply it with the view to use and setDuration() to set the duration. Once your Toast is configured, call its show() method, and the message will be displayed.

Alert! Alert!
If you would prefer something in the more classic dialog box style, what you want is an AlertDialog. As with any other modal dialog box, an AlertDialog pops up, grabs the focus, and stays there until closed by the user. You might use this for a critical error, a validation message that cannot be effectively displayed in the base activity UI, or some other situation where you are sure that the user needs to see the message and needs to see it now. The simplest way to construct an AlertDialog is to use the Builder class. Following in true builder style, Builder offers a series of methods to configure an AlertDialog, each method returning the Builder for easy chaining. At the end, you call show() on the builder to display the dialog. Commonly used configuration methods on Builder include the following: setMessage(): Sets the body of the dialog to be a simple textual message, from either a supplied String or a supplied string resource ID. setTitle() and setIcon(): Configure the text and/or icon to appear in the title bar of the dialog. setPositiveButton(), setNeutralButton(), and setNegativeButton(): Indicate which button(s) should appear across the bottom of the dialog, where they should be positioned (left, center, or right, respectively), what their captions should be, and what logic should be invoked when the button is clicked (besides dismissing the dialog). If you need to configure the AlertDialog beyond what the builder allows, instead of calling show(), call create() to get the partially built AlertDialog instance, configure it the rest of the way, and then call one of the flavors of show() on the AlertDialog itself. Once show() is called, the dialog will appear and await user input.

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Checking Them Out

To see how these work in practice, take a peek at Messages/Message, containing the following layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <Button android:id="@+id/alert" android:text="Raise an alert" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"/> <Button android:id="@+id/toast" android:text="Make a toast" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"/> </LinearLayout>

Heres the Java code:

public class MessageDemo extends Activity implements View.OnClickListener { Button alert; Button toast; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle icicle) { super.onCreate(icicle); setContentView(R.layout.main); alert=(Button)findViewById(R.id.alert); alert.setOnClickListener(this); toast=(Button)findViewById(R.id.toast); toast.setOnClickListener(this); } public void onClick(View view) { if (view==alert) { new AlertDialog.Builder(this) .setTitle("MessageDemo") .setMessage("eek!") .setNeutralButton("Close", new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(DialogInterface dlg, int sumthin) { // do nothing it will close on its own } }) .show(); } else { Toast .makeText(this, "<clink, clink>", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT)

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.show(); } } }

The layout is unremarkablejust a pair of buttons to trigger the alert and the toast. When the Raise an alert button is clicked, we use a builder (new Builder(this)) to set the title (setTitle("MessageDemo")), message (setMessage("eek!")), and neutral button (setNeutralButton("Close", new OnClickListener() ...) before showing the dialog. When the Close button is clicked, the OnClickListener callback does nothing; the mere fact that the button was pressed causes the dialog to be dismissed. However, you could update information in your activity based on the user action, particularly if you have multiple buttons for the user to choose from. The result is a typical dialog, as shown in Figure 141.

Figure 141. The MessageDemo sample application, after clicking the Raise an alert button

When the Make a toast button is clicked, the Toast class makes us a text-based toast (makeText(this, "<clink, clink>", LENGTH_SHORT)), which we then show(). The result is a short-lived, noninterrupting message, as shown in Figure 142.

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Figure 142. The same application, after clicking the Make a toast button

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