Android Development - Offline Support

This post is amongst the series of post for discussion about development of an App in Android Platform. We have been developing an app, named GitHub Contributions as an example. In each post, we keep adding some new feature to the app, which adds to our knowledge about android.

In this post, we are going to see how we can add offline support to our app. So if a user has launched our app and there is no internet connection available, we cannot download user profile’s data from github.com. In this case, we can show any previous data downloaded for the specified user. If we are running the app for the first time for the user, then we can just show a Not-Connected message on the screen. As soon as the user connects to the network, we can attempt to download the information and show the pretty view.

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Android Development - Scheduled Execution

This is a continuation of our post discussing different areas of android development. We are getting introduced to android development while developing an application GitHub Contributions App. There are a number of ways we can delay processing of some work in android. It also allows us to execute these work items on a periodic basis. There are a number of options for an android developer for introducing scheduled execution.

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GitHub Contributions App - Android Internal file Storage

This is a continuation of a post for building an android app for displaying GitHub contributions of a user. We are using name of user for pulling down profile and repository details of the user. As we are adding features to the app, we have been learning about android and its development model.

Currently we are at the point that we can download the data asynchronously and display it on the UI. User can also change user and the data is downloaded for the new user. In this post, we want to build up on this by adding the following:

Keep the data in a file so that when the app needs it it can just be pulled from a file rather than being downloaded from the web. This can also cater to the offline scenarios when the app is launched while being disconnected from the network. We also don’t need to download data if the app is launched within 3 hours of when the data was downloaded last time.

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GitHub Contributions App - Android App Preferences

In this post we are continuing with the app. We will be updating the action bar from default to custom. Currently, you can only see author’s GitHub contributions. We will be providing a setting to change GitHub user. The feature will be provided by adding an action bar button for settings. Read more...