Handling Click Events using Custom Binding Adapters

Post author:Saurav Tiwary
Post published:June 20, 2018
Post category:Android GSoC Open Event
Post comments:0 Comments

The Open Event Organiser Android App is the Event management app for organizers using the Open Event Platform. It is currently released in the Alpha phase on the Google Play Store here and is being actively developed by the community.

The Data Binding Library is one of the most popular libraries among the android developers. We use it extensively in the application in order to greatly simplify the UI binding logic. While trying to show the details of a speaker in the application, we wanted to list his/her social media links using Image buttons.

Upon clicking one of these buttons, the user was supposed to be directed to the link after opening the default web browser. This blog post discusses how we used custom Binding Adapters to handle click events on an Image Button by defining a custom attribute.

Defining the Binding Adapter

We defined a simple Binding Adapter for an Image button meant to handle social media links. We used “imageOnClick” as the custom attribute name for specifying the URL that will be opened once the button is clicked.

@BindingAdapter("imageOnClick")
public static void bindOnImageButtonClickListener(ImageButton imageButton, String url) {
  imageButton.setOnClickListener(view -> {
    if (url != null) {
      Context context = imageButton.getContext();
      Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
      intent.setData(Uri.parse(url));
      if (intent.resolveActivity(context.getPackageManager()) != null) {
        context.startActivity(intent);
      } else {
        Toast.makeText(context, "No Web browser found", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
      }
    }
  });
}

The method can be named anything you want and can be placed anywhere in the project but we would recommend creating a separate class for all the Binding adapters.
The important things to take away from the above method are:

The method needs to be public otherwise the Data binding framework won’t be able to find it.
We need to pass in the view as the first parameter and the attribute value as the second parameter.

Then we simply set the familiar click listener to handle the click interaction. We use the Context from the view passed in the method as the first parameter. Then we create an Intent and set the passed in URL as the data. We make sure that the user has a browser installed on his/her android phone before we try to open the browser. We show a suitable error message if they don’t.

Using it in Layout

Using the custom attribute in the layout was extremely simple. We specified the url using the attribute “imageOnClick” and the rest was handled by the Binding Adapter and the Data binding framework.

<ImageButton
     android:id="@+id/action_speakers_linkedin"
     android:layout_width="@dimen/spacing_larger"
     android:layout_height="match_parent"
     android:contentDescription="@string/linkedin_icon"
     app:imageOnClick="@{ speaker.linkedin }"
     android:background="#ededed"
     android:visibility="@{ (speaker.linkedin != null) ? View.VISIBLE : View.GONE }"
     app:srcCompat="@drawable/ic_linkedin_colored"/>

References

Data Binding Library: Data Binding Library
Binding Adapters guide: Binding Adapters

Option to secure particular albums in Phimpme Android Application

Post author:Saurav Vishal
Post published:June 14, 2018
Post category:Android FOSSASIA GSoC Phimpme
Post comments:0 Comments

In the Phimpme Android application, users can perform various operations on the albums available such as creating a zip file of the album, rename an album and many more. However, one another useful functionality that has been added to the Phimpme Android application is the option to secure particular albums. So in this post, I will be discussing the implementation of this security feature.

Step 1

Firstly, a view item for providing the option to enable security for particular albums is required to be added to the security settings layout. The two-state toggle switch widget provided by the Android framework along with a textview has been added as the required view item. A screenshot depicting the layout change is provided below.

The code snippet representing the operation is provided below.

Step 2

Now we need to keep track of the albums selected by the user to secure. This can be done by storing the selected album/albums paths in an ArrayList<String> which can be referred later when required in the process.

The required code snippet to perform the above mentioned operation is provided below.

holder.foldercheckbox.setOnCheckedChangeListener(new CompoundButton.OnCheckedChangeListener() {
@Override public void onCheckedChanged(CompoundButton compoundButton, boolean b) {
if(b){
securedfol.add(a.getPath());
a.setsecured(true);
}else{
securedfol.remove(a.getPath());
a.setsecured(false);
}
}
});

Step 3

Now we need to store the selected albums preference in the SharedPreference so that the user’s security preference persists even when the user exits the application and the user doesn’t have to redo the securing operation the next time user launches the application. The ArrayList<String> object containing the path of the user choice albums are converted to JSON representation by the use of the Gson Java library and the string key denoting the JSON representation of the list is saved in the SharedPreference thereafter.

if(securedfol.size()>0){
  SharedPreferences.Editor editor = SP.getEditor();
  Gson gson = new Gson();
  String securedfolders = gson.toJson(securedfol);
  editor.putString(getString(R.string.preference_use_password_secured_local_folders), securedfolders);
  editor.commit();}

Now at the time of performing other operations on the secured folders, the list containing the secured folder paths is retrieved from SharedPreference and the choosen folder’s path is searched in the obtained list, then the user is asked to authenticate accordingly.

This is how we have implemented the functionality to secure particular albums in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android Github repository listed in the resource section below.

Resources

1.Android Developer Guide –
https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared-preferences

2.Github-Phimpme Android Repository – https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/

3.Gson Java library tutorial –
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/JavaLibrary-Gson/article.html

Implementing Search Functionality in Phimpme Android Application.

Post author:Saurav Vishal
Post published:June 13, 2018
Post category:Android FOSSASIA Phimpme
Post comments:0 Comments

In the Phimpme Android application, users are provided with options to perform various operations on the albums available such as move, creating a zip file of the album, rename an album and many more. However, one another useful functionality that has been added to the Phimpme Android application is the option to search albums. So in this post, I will be discussing the implementation of search functionality.

Step 1

Android framework provides developers with a search widget called SearchView that provides a user interface for the user to search a query and submit the request. So first setting up the widget in the action bar of the activity is required. The searchview widget can be added to the action bar as a menu item by adding the following lines in the XML menu resource file menu_albums.xml.

Step 2

Now SearchView.OnQueryTextListener interface is used for initiating the search operation and listening to the callbacks for changes to the query text. For the purpose of listening to the querytext, two methods are used here both of which are listed below.

onQueryTextChanged(String Text) – This method is called every time the query text is changed by the user and returns a boolean value, false if SearchView should perform the default action of showing any suggestions and true if the action was handled by the listener.

onQueryTextSubmit(String query) – This method is called when the user submits a query which could be done with a key press on the keyboard or by pressing the submit button. It also returns a boolean value which is true if the query has been handled by the listener, otherwise false.

The code snippet for the implementation of the above mentioned interface is provided below.

searchView.setOnQueryTextListener(new SearchView.OnQueryTextListener() {
  @Override
  public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) {
      return false;
  }

  @Override
  public boolean onQueryTextChange(String newText) {
      return searchTitle(newText);
  }
});

Step 3

In the final step, with the use of the onQueryTextChange method of the SearchView.onQueryTextListener interface the search operation and displaying the search results in the UI can be achieved. The onQueryTextChange method is called every time the search-query text changes. From the onQueryTextChange method, another method named searchTitle is invoked. Inside the searchTitle method the album names matching the search-query are searched from an Arraylist<Albums> containing all the albums displayed in the application. The albums obtained as a result of the search operation are then stored in another Arraylist<Album> which is thereafter passed as a parameter to the swapDataSet method of the AlbumsAdapter class to display the searched albums in the album view. The code snippet used for the above operations is provided below.

public boolean searchTitle(String newText) {
  if (!fromOnClick) {
      String queryText = newText;
      queryText = queryText.toLowerCase();
      final ArrayList<Album> newList = new ArrayList<>();
      for (Album album : albList) {
          String name = album.getName().toLowerCase();
          if (name.contains(queryText)) {
              newList.add(album);
          }
      }
      if(newList.isEmpty()){
          checkNoSearchResults(newText);
      }
      else{
          if(textView.getVisibility() == View.VISIBLE){
              textView.setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE);
          }
      }
      albumsAdapter.swapDataSet(newList);
  } else {
      fromOnClick = false;
  }
  return true;
}

This is how we have implemented the search functionality in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android Github repository.

The screenshot for displaying the search result in album view is provided below.

Resources

1.Android Developer Guide – https://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/SearchView

2.Github-Phimpme Android Repository – https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/

3.Creating a search interface in Android – https://medium.com/@yugandhardcs21/creating-a-search-interface-in-android-dc1fd6a53b4

Publish an Open Source app on Fdroid

Post author:CloudyPadmal
Post published:June 9, 2018
Post category:Android Community FOSSASIA GSoC Pocket Science Lab Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

Fdroid is a famous software repository hosted with numerous free and open source Android apps. They have a main repository where they allow developers hosting free and ad free software after a thorough check up on the app. This blog will tell you how to get your project hosted in their repository using steps I followed to publish the PSLab Android app.

Before you get started, make sure you have the consent from your developer community to publish their app on Fdroid. Fdroid requires your app to use all kind of open resources to implement features. If there is any closed source libraries in your app and you still want to publish it on Fdroid, you may have to reimplement that feature by any other mean without using closed source resources. They will also not allow to have Google’s proprietary “play-services” in your app along with proprietary ad services. You can find the complete inclusion policy document from their official page.

When your app is fully ready, you can get started with the inclusion procedure. Unlike how we are publishing apps on Google Play, publishing an app on Fdroid is as simple as sending a pull request to their main repository. That’s exactly what we have to do. In simple terms all we have to do is:

Fork the Fdroid main data repository
Make changes to their files to include our app
Do a pull request

First of all you need a GitLab account as the Fdroid repository is hosted in GitLab. Once you are ready with a GitLab account, fork and clone the f-droid-data repository. The next step is to install the fdroid-server. This can be simply done using apt:

$ sudo apt install fdroidserver

Once that is done, go into the directory where you cloned the repository and run the following command to read current meta data where it saves all the information related to existing apps on Fdroid;

$ fdroid readmeta

This will list out various details about the current meta files. Next step is to add our app details into this meta file. This can be done easily using following command or you can manually create folders and files. But the following is safer;

$ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/pslab-android --subdir app

Replace the link to repository from the –url tag in the above command. For instance the following will be the link for fossasia-phimpme android;

$ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android --subdir app

This will create a file named as “org.fossasia.pslab” in the metadata directory. Open up this text file and we have to fill in our details.

Categories
License
Web Site
Summary
Description

Description needs to be terminated with a newline and a dot to avoid build failures.

Once the file is filled up, run the following command to make sure that the metadata file is complete.

$ fdroid readmeta

Then run the following command to clean up the file

$ fdroid rewritemeta org.fossasia.pslab

We can automatically add version details using the following command:

$ fdroid checkupdates org.fossasia.pslab

Now run the lint test to see if the app is building correctly.

$ fdroid lint org.fossasia.pslab

If there are any errors thrown, fix them to get to the next step where we actually build the app:

$ fdroid build -v -l org.fossasia.pslab

Now you are ready to make the pull request which will then get reviewed by developers in Fdroid community to get it merged into their main branch. Make a commit and then push to your fork. From there it is pretty straightforward to make a pull request to the main repository. Once that is done, they will test the app for any insecurities. If all of them are passed, the app will be available in Fdroid!

Reference:

Quick Start: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/README.md#quickstart
Making merge requests: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#merge-requests

Implementing Clickable Images

Post author:CloudyPadmal
Post published:June 8, 2018
Post category:Android Community FOSSASIA GSoC Pocket Science Lab Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

PSLab Android application is a feature rich compact app to user interface the PSLab hardware device. Similarly the PSLab device itself is a compact device with a plenty of features to replace almost all the analytical instruments in a school science lab. When a first time user takes the device and connect it with the Android app, there are so many pins labeled with abbreviations. This creates lots of complications unless the user checks the pinout diagram separately.

As a workaround a UI is proposed to integrate a layout containing the PSLab PCB image where user can click on each pin to get a dialog box explaining him what that specific pin is and what it does. This implementation can be done it two ways;

Using an Image map
Using (x,y) coordinates

The first implementation is more practical and can be applied with any device with any dimension. The latter requires some transformation to capture the correct position when user has clicked on a pin. So the first method will be implemented.

The idea behind using an image map is to have two images with exact dimensions on top of each other. The topmost image will be the color map which we create ourselves using unique colors at unique heat points. This image will have the visibility setting invisible as the main idea is to let the user see a meaningful image and capture the positions using a secondary in the back end.

To make things much clear, let’s have a look at a color map image I am suggesting here for a general case.

If we overlap the color map with the PSLab layout, we will be able to detect where user has clicked using Android onTouchEvent.

@Override
public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent ev) {
   final int action = ev.getAction();
   final int evX = (int) ev.getX();
   final int evY = (int) ev.getY();
   switch (action) {
       case MotionEvent.ACTION_UP :
         int touchColor = getHotspotColor (R.id.backgroundMap, evX, evY);
         /* Display the relevant pin description dialog box here */
         break;
   }
   return true;
}

Color of the clicked position can be captured using the following code;

public int getHotspotColor (int hotspotId, int x, int y) {
   ImageView img = (ImageView) findViewById (hotspotId);
   img.setDrawingCacheEnabled(true);
   Bitmap hotspots = Bitmap.createBitmap(img.getDrawingCache());
   img.setDrawingCacheEnabled(false);
   return hotspots.getPixel(x, y);
}

If we go into details, from the onTouchEvent we capture the (x,y) coordinates related to user click. Then this location is looked up for a unique color by creating a temporary bitmap and then getting the pixel value at the captured coordinate.

There is an error in this method as the height parameter always have an offset. This offset is introduced by the status bar and the action bar of the application. If we use this method directly, there will be an exception thrown out saying image height is less than the height defined by y.

Solving this issue involves calculating status bar and actionbar heights separately and then subtract them from the y coordinate.

Actionbar and status bar heights can be calculated as follows;

Rect rectangle = new Rect();
Window window = getWindow();
window.getDecorView().getWindowVisibleDisplayFrame(rectangle);
int statusBarHeight = rectangle.top;
int contentViewTop = window.findViewById(Window.ID_ANDROID_CONTENT).getTop();
int titleBarHeight= contentViewTop - statusBarHeight;

Using them, we can modify the captured coordinates as follows;

int touchColor = getHotspotColor (R.id.imageArea, evX, evY - statusBarHeight);

This way the exception is handled by adjusting the cursor position. Once this is done, it is all about displaying the correct pin description dialog box.

Reference:

Images with clickable areas: https://blahti.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/images-with-clickable-areas/

Calculate status bar height: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3407256/height-of-status-bar-in-android

Making Shapes with PSLab Oscilloscope

Post author:CloudyPadmal
Post published:May 21, 2018
Post category:Android FOSSASIA GSoC Pocket Science Lab Tutorial
Post comments:0 Comments

Looking back to history, the first ever video game was ‘Pong’ which was played on an analog oscilloscope with a very small screen. Oscilloscopes are not made to play video games, but by just tinkering around its basic functionality which is display waveforms, we can do plenty of cool things. PSLab device also has an oscilloscope; in fact it’s a four channel oscilloscope.

This blog post will show you how the oscilloscope in PSLab is not just a cheap oscilloscope but it has lots of functionalities an industry grade oscilloscope has (except for the bandwidth limitation to a maximum of 2 MHz)

To produce shapes like above figures, we are using another instrument available in PSLab. That is ‘Waveform Generator’. PSLab Waveform Generator can generate three different waveforms namely Sine waves, Triangular waves and Square waves ranging from 5 Hz to 5 kHz.

To get started, first connect two jumper wires between SI1-CH1 and SI2-CH2 pins. We needn’t worry about ground pins as they are already internally connected. Now it’s time to open up the PSLab oscilloscope. Here we are going to utilize two channels for this activity and they will be CH1 and CH2. Check the tick boxes in front of ‘Chan 1’ and ‘Chan 2’ and set ‘Range’ to “+/-4V” to have the maximum visibility filling the whole screen with the waveform.

The shapes are drawn using a special mode called ‘X-Y Mode’ in PSLab oscilloscope. In this mode, two channels will be plotted against their amplitudes at every point in time.

As it is already mentioned that PSLab can generate many waveform types and also they can have different phase angles relative to each other. They can have different independent frequencies. With all these combinations, we can tweak the settings in Waveform Generator to produce different cool shapes in PSLab oscilloscope.

These shapes can vary from basic geometric shapes such as circle, square, rectangle to complicated shapes such as rhombus, ellipse and polynomial curves.

Circle

A circular shape can be made by generating two sine waves having the same frequency but with a phase difference of 90 degrees or 270 degrees between the two wave forms.

Square

Square shape can be made by generating two triangular waveforms again having the same frequency but with a phase difference of either 90 degrees or 270 degrees between the two.

Rectangle

Similar to creating a Square, by having the same frequency for both triangular waveforms but a different phase angle greater than or less than 90 degree will do the trick.

Rhombus

Keeping the waveform settings same for the rectangle, by changing the amplitude of the SI1 waveform using the knob we can generate a rhombic shape on the XY graph plot.

Ellipse

Generating ellipse is also similar to creating a rhombus. But here we are using sine waves instead of triangular waves. By changing the amplitude of SI1 using the knob we can change the curvature.

Helix

Helix or spiral shape can be generated using two sine waves having same phase but two different frequencies. Frequencies better be integer multiples of the smaller frequency to have a steady shape.

Parabola

Parabolic shapes can be generated by mixing up triangular waves with sine waves with different phase angles.

More random shapes

References:

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm

Option to exclude albums in Phimpme Android Application

Post author:Saurav Vishal
Post published:February 23, 2018
Post category:Android Phimpme
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In the Phimpme Android Application, users can perform various operations on the albums available such as move, creating a .zip file of the album, rename an album, delete the album and much more. However one another important functionality that has been implemented in the application is the option to exclude album/albums. In this post we will be discussing how we achieved the functionality to exclude albums in Phimpme Android Application.

Step 1

First we need to keep track of the albums selected by the user to exclude. This can be done by storing the selected albums in an Arraylist<Album> which can be referred later when required for the process of exclusion. The storing of the albums can be done with the help of following lines of code.

private int toggleSelectAlbum(int index) {
if (dispAlbums.get(index) != null) {
  dispAlbums.get(index).setSelected(!dispAlbums.get(index).isSelected());
  if (dispAlbums.get(index).isSelected()) selectedAlbums.add(dispAlbums.get(index));
  else selectedAlbums.remove(dispAlbums.get(index));
}
return index;
}

Step 2

After the selected albums are stored in an Arraylist<Album>, a function call of excludeSelectedAlbums() of HandlingAlbums class is done passing in Context as the parameter. In the method excludeSelectedAlbums() the selected albums are retrieved from the Arraylist one by one and another method excludeAlbum() is called with the album, context being passed as the parameters. The code snippet performing the above operation is provided below.

public void excludeSelectedAlbums(Context context) {
for (Album selectedAlbum : selectedAlbums)
excludeAlbum(context, selectedAlbum);
clearSelectedAlbums();
}

Step 3

Thereafter an instance of class CustomsAlbumHelper is created and excludeAlbum() method is called with path of the album passed as parameter, and the selected album is removed from the list containing the currently displayed albums. Code snippets for the above operations are provided below.

private void excludeAlbum(Context context, Album a) {
CustomAlbumsHelper h = CustomAlbumsHelper.getInstance(context);
h.excludeAlbum(a.getPath());
dispAlbums.remove(a);
}

Step 4

Now in the excludeAlbum() method of CustomsAlbumHelper class a writable instance of albums_settings sqlite database is obtained. A check is performed if the current album is present in the albums table or not, if not then a row representing the current album is created. Thereafter the excluded value for the current album in the table is updated to integer 1 denoting that the album is excluded. The code snippet required for the above mentioned operations are provided below.

public void excludeAlbum(String path) {
  SQLiteDatabase db = this.getWritableDatabase();
  checkAndCreateAlbum(db, path);
  ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
  values.put(ALBUM_EXCLUDED, 1);
  db.update(TABLE_ALBUMS, values, ALBUM_PATH+“=?”, new String[]{    path});
  db.close();
}

This is how we have achieved the functionality of excluding albums in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android GitHub repository listed in the resources section below.

The screenshot for the display of the excluded albums is provided below.

Resources

Android Developer Guide –https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/sqlite.html

Github-Phimpme Android Repository –https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/

Sqlite Operations Tutorial – https://www.androidhive.info/2011/11/android-sqlite-database-tutorial/

Option to hide albums in Phimpme Android Application

Post author:Saurav Vishal
Post published:February 19, 2018
Post category:Android Phimpme
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In Phimpme Android Application, users can perform various operations on the albums available such as move, creating a .zip file for the album, delete the album, exclude an album, rename an album, pin an album to the top and more. However one another important functionality that has been added in the application is the option to hide album/albums. So in this post I will be discussing how we achieved the functionality to hide albums in Phimpme Android Application.

Step 1

First we need to get the albums which are selected to be hidden. This can be done by storing the selected items in an Arraylist<Album> which will keep track of the users choice to hide albums. This can be achieved with the following lines of code.

Step 2

After storing of the albums to be hidden a function hideSelectedAlbums() is called with Context being passed as the parameter. Now inside this function we retrieve the albums looping through the Arraylist that stores the albums to be hidden and call another function hideAlbum() passing in the album and context as the parameters. The code snippet representing the above operation is given below.

public void hideSelectedAlbums(Context context) {
for (Album selectedAlbum : selectedAlbums)
hideAlbum(selectedAlbum, context);
clearSelectedAlbums();
}

Step 3.

Now a .nomedia file is added to the directories/albums which are to be hidden and the android Media Scanner System service is triggered thereafter. As a result of the presence of the .nomedia file inside the directory the Media Scanner service won’t scan the particular directory/album thereby the album will not be picked up at the time of displaying the albums. The code snippet to perform the mentioned operation is provided below.

File dirName = new File(path);
File file = new File(dirName, “.nomedia”);
if (!file.exists()) {
try {
  FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
  out.flush();
  out.close();
  scanFile(context, new String[]{ file.getAbsolutePath() });
} catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
}
}

The screenshot for the display of hidden folders is provided below.

This is how we have achieved the functionality of hiding albums in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android GitHub repository listed in the resources section below.

Resources

Android Developer Guide – https://developer.android.com/reference/android/media/MediaScannerConnection.html
Github-Phimpme Android Repository –https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/
Hiding directories using .nomedia file – http://www.easycodeway.com/2016/08/hide-files-in-android-using-nomedia-file.html

Displaying Image location Address In Phimpme Android Application

Post author:Saurav Vishal
Post published:February 18, 2018
Post category:Android Phimpme
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In Phimpme Android application one of the features available is to view the details of any image. The details consists of attributes including Date and time at which the image was captured, size of the image, title, path, EXIF data, description added to the image, location etc. However in the location attribute the location coordinates of the image as well as the location address can be displayed depending on the user’s preference. The process of obtaining the coordinates from address is called as Geocoding and obtaining string address from coordinates is called reverse Geocoding. So in this post I will be explaining how to implement set of strings denoting the address from the available coordinates.

Step 1

First we need to create an instance of the class Geocoder passing context and function Locale.getDefault() as the parameters. The function of the attribute Locale.getdefault is provided below.

Locale.getDefault() – It returns the current value of the default locale for the current instance of the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Virtual Machine sets the default locale during startup based on the host environment.The code snippet to perform the above mentioned operation is given below.

Geocoder geocoder = new Geocoder(context, Locale.getDefault());

Step 2

Now a function call of getFromLocation() of the Geocoder class is done where we need to pass the Lattitude and Longitude values of the Location object as parameters. The lattitude and longitudes values can be obtained by the use of the Location object functions getLatitude() and getLongitude() respectively. The function getFromLocation() will return a list of Address objects which will contain the extracted addresses from the passed latitude and longitude values. We also need to pass a third parameter an integer value which will determine the maximum no of addresses to be returned. Here we have requested for a maximum of one address. The following code snippet is used to perform the desired function call.

try {
List<Address> addressList = geocoder.getFromLocation(location.getLatitude(), location.getLongitude(), 1);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

Step 3

After obtaining the list of Address objects returned from the function call of getFromLocation() we will extract the first address from the list since we want a maximum of 1 address. The Address object will contain information like the address name, country, state, postal code etc. Now the set of strings describing the location can be retrieved with the help of the function getMaxAddressLineIndex() of Address class. The code snippets to perform the above mentioned operations is provided below.

ArrayList<String> addresslines = new ArrayList<String>();
Address address = addressList.get(0);
for(int i = 0; i <= address.getMaxAddressLineIndex(); i++) {
addresslines.add(address.getAddressLine(i));
}
details.put(context.getString(R.string.location), TextUtils.join(System.getProperty(“line.separator”),
addresslines));

The screenshot displaying the location address is provided below.

This is how we have achieved the functionality of displaying location address in a set of strings from available coordinates in the Phimpme Android application. To get the full source code, please refer to the Phimpme Android GitHub repository listed in the resources section below.

Resources

1.Android Developer Guide – https://developer.android.com/training/location/display-address.html

2.Github-Phimpme Android Repository – https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/

3.Address Class Guide- https://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Address.html

Leak Canary in Phimpme Android

Post author:codedsun
Post published:February 18, 2018
Post category:Android FOSSASIA Phimpme
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Leak Canary is a memory detection library for Android and Java. A memory leak occurs when you hold an object for too long after its purpose has been served. If some object is holding another object then the Garbage collector will not be able to collect and this is known as Memory Leak. These memory leaks can be minor (in KB’s) or can lead to an app in ANR state with OutOfMemoryError.Hence to recover and capture this memory leak, Leak Canary is used for Android and Java.

For every functioning done in android, the system needs resource such as memory. Hence in Java the Garbage Collector(GC) plays a major role in deallocating the memory. The GC is mainly used to reclaim memory. Now the question arises, why do we need a memory leak detection library when GC is already present. The answer is sometimes the developers makes programming mistakes and that leads to inhibit the GC to collect the objects that are of no use and mark them as useful objects.

The GC starts from one point(root) and marks active to all the objects that holds references from GC root and the objects which are not marked are wiped out of memory.Hence when some unuseful objects is marked active, memory leak occurs.Hence to eliminate these problems of memory leaks, we have employed the use of Leak Canary in our project.

The Phimpme project and every related project has possible memory leaks, like for instance we have used fragments in settings activity and to catch that memory leak we have added the refwatcher instance. Hence if any memory leaks occur we get the error such as ‘org.fossasia.phimpme’ leaked 40kb.This can also be checked by Leaks App in the android phone, which has features of showing and sharing the heap dump and info.

To add the Leak Canary in your android app, follow these steps:

Add the dependencies in build.gradle(app level)

dependencies {
   debugCompile 'com.squareup.leakcanary:leakcanary-android:1.5.4'
   releaseCompile 'com.squareup.leakcanary:leakcanary-android-no-op:1.5.4'
 }

Add the following code to your Application class

public class MyApplication extends Application{
@Override
public void onCreate() {
   if (LeakCanary.isInAnalyzerProcess(this)) {
       // This process is dedicated to LeakCanary for heap analysis.
       // You should not init your app in this process.
       return;
   }
   LeakCanary.install(this);
}

Leak canary now will automatically detect the memory leaks from all activities.

For fragment a refwatcher is needed, hence

public class MYFragment extends Fragment {
    ...

    @Override
    public void onDestroy() {
        super.onDestroy();
        MainApplication.getRefWatcher(getActivity()).watch(this);
    }
}

Hence LeakCanary is setup finally, and now the memory leaks will be detected.

Resources

How to fix memory leaks in Android, Desmond Lua: https://code.luasoftware.com/tutorials/android/how-to-fix-memory-leaks-in-android/
Leak Canary on Github: https://github.com/square/leakcanary