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Adding Preference Settings using Preference Fragment Compat

It is very much likely that one needs to add preferences to their app which span the entire application and therefore can be accessed anywhere in the app without storing anything in database or making global variables. For an instance, in Open Event Organizer App we added the preferences to store the privacy policy, cookie policy etc. The user can access these items in Settings Preference which in device settings. In this blog post we will see how to add preference settings to the app by storing the data in shared preferences.

Specifications

The benefit of storing the data in shared preference and not in local storage is that the access time for the data is drastically reduced and the data persists even when the app is closed. We will use this library which is built on top of official preference-v7 library.

Firstly, we will make a preference resource layout file and add the preference for privacy policy and cookie policy in the preference screen.

<PreferenceScreen xmlns:android=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android”>

<Preference
android:key=”@string/privacy_policy_key”
android:title=”@string/privacy_policy” />

<Preference
android:key=”@string/cookie_policy_key”
android:title=”@string/cookie_policy” />

</PreferenceScreen>

Make a separate preference fragment class named LegalPreferenceFragment which extends PreferenceFragmentCompat. Then we will override onCreatePreferenceFix() method.

Inside this, we will create an instance of Preference Manager and set shared preference name for it and set the preference using the layout file. This enables us to use findPreference() method to retrieve the layout preferences by their key. After, retrieving the preference we will set onClick listener to launch activity with an intent to open browser for the url passed in data bundle.

@Override
public void onCreatePreferencesFix(@Nullable Bundle bundle, String rootKey) {
PreferenceManager manager = getPreferenceManager();
manager.setSharedPreferencesName(Constants.FOSS_PREFS);

setPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.legal_preferences, rootKey);

findPreference(getString(R.string.privacy_policy_key)).setOnPreferenceClickListener(preference -> {
BrowserUtils.launchUrl(getContext(), PRIVACY_POLICY_URL);
return true;
});
findPreference(getString(R.string.cookie_policy_key)).setOnPreferenceClickListener(preference -> {
BrowserUtils.launchUrl(getContext(), COOKIE_POLICY_URL);
return true;
});
}

References

  1. Preference Fragment Compat library by Takisoft https://github.com/Gericop/Android-Support-Preference-V7-Fix
  2. Android Preference Documentation https://developer.android.com/reference/android/preference/PreferenceGroup

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