Option to pin albums in Phimpme Android Application

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 pin albums. So in this post, I will be discussing the implementation of the pin to top functionality.

Step 1

First, we need to add an option in the overflow menu to pin the album which has been selected, to the top. The pin to top option can be added in the overflow menu by implementing the following lines of code in the menu_albums.xml file(This file contains the overflow menu options for albums).

<item
  android:id=“@+id/set_pin_album”
  android:title=“@string/pin”
  app:showAsAction=“never” />

Step 2

Now when the user selects the option to pin any album to the top, the user’s choice of the selected album is retrieved by the getSelectedAlbum method of Handling Albums class. Thereafter the togglePin method of class Album Settings is invoked, passing in the context as a parameter. In the togglePin method an instance of the CustomHelper class is obtained first, then its pinAlbum method is called passing in the album path and a variable pinned as the parameters. Here depending on the boolean value of the variable pinned, the selected album will be pinned or unpinned. The code snippets used to implement getSelectedAlbum and togglePin method are provided below.

public Album getSelectedAlbum(int index) {
return selectedAlbums.get(index);
}
public void togglePin(Context context) {
this.pinned = !pinned;
CustomAlbumsHelper h = CustomAlbumsHelper.getInstance(context);
h.pinAlbum(path, pinned);
}

The getSelectedAlbum method and the togglePin method are subsequently used by the following line of code.

getAlbums().getSelectedAlbum(0).settings.togglePin(getApplicationContext());

Step 3

In this step, I’d discuss the implementation of the pinAlbum method invoked inside the togglePin method. In the pinAlbum method, first a writable instance of album_settings SQLite database is obtained. The album_settings database maintains information about the albums in a table with the name of the table Albums and the columns representing info about the album such as path, excluded, pinned, sortorder etc. Next, the checkAndCreateAlbum method would be invoked passing in the writable instance of the database and path of the album as parameters. Now inside the checkAndCreateAlbum method, a check would be performed to determine whether a column representing info about the selected album is already present or not, if not a row is created for the selected album. The code snippet used to implement the checkAndCreateAlbum is provided below.

private void checkAndCreateAlbum(SQLiteDatabase db, String path) {

  Cursor cursor = db.query(TABLE_ALBUMS, null,  ALBUM_PATH+“=?”,
          new String[]{ path }, null, null, null);

  if (cursor.getCount() == 0) {
      ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
      values.put(ALBUM_PATH, path);
      values.put(ALBUM_SORTING_MODE, SortingMode.DATE.getValue());
      values.put(ALBUM_SORTING_ORDER, SortingOrder.DESCENDING.getValue());
      values.put(ALBUM_EXCLUDED, 0);
      db.insert(TABLE_ALBUMS, null, values);
  }

  cursor.close();
}

Now in the pinAlbum method through the writable instance of the album_settings database, the pinned information of the selected album is updated in the Albums table accordingly. The code snippets used to implement the pinAlbum method is provided below.

void pinAlbum(String path, boolean status) {
  SQLiteDatabase db = this.getWritableDatabase();
  checkAndCreateAlbum(db, path);
  ContentValues values = new ContentValues();
  values.put(ALBUM_PINNED, status ? 1 : 0);
  db.update(TABLE_ALBUMS, values, ALBUM_PATH+“=?”, new String[]{ path });
  db.close();
}

At last, the notifyDataSetChanged method of the AlbumsAdapter class would be called so as to display the pinned albums at the top irrespective of the sorting order.

A screenshot displaying the pinned albums at the top in albums view is provided below.

This is how we have implemented the functionality to pin an album to top 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 documentation –https://developer.android.com/reference/android/database/sqlite/SQLiteDatabase

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

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

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