gson

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. <TextView   android:id="@+id/security_body_apply_folders_title"   android:layout_width="wrap_content"   android:layout_height="wrap_content"   android:text="@string/local_folder"   android:textColor="@color/md_dark_background"   android:textSize="@dimen/medium_text" /> <android.support.v7.widget.SwitchCompat   android:id="@+id/security_body_apply_folder_switch"   android:layout_width="wrap_content"   android:layout_height="wrap_content"   android:layout_alignParentEnd="true"   android:layout_centerVertical="true"   android:layout_gravity="center_vertical"   android:button="@null"   android:hapticFeedbackEnabled="true" /> 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