Implementing Attendee Detail BottomSheet UI in Open Event Orga App

In Open Event Orga App (Github Repo), we allow the option to check the attendee details before checking him/her in or out. Originally, a dialog was shown showing the attendee details, which did not contain much information about the attendee, ticket or the order. The disadvantage of such design was also that it was tied to only one view. We couldn’t show the check in dialog elsewhere in the app, like during QR scanning. So we had to switch back to the attendee view for showing the check in dialog. We decided to create a usable detached component in the form of a bottom sheet containing all required information. This blog will outline the procedure we employed to design the bottom sheet UI.

The attendee check in dialog looked like this:

So, first we decide what we need to show on the check in bottom sheet:

  • Attendee Name
  • Attendee Email
  • Attendee Check In Status
  • Order Status ( Completed, Pending, etc )
  • TIcket Type ( Free, Paid, Donation )
  • Ticket Price
  • Order Date
  • Invoice Number
  • Order ‘Paid Via’

As we are using Android Data Binding in our layout, we’ll start by including the variables required in the layout. Besides the obvious attendee variable, we need presenter instance to handle the check in and check out of the attendee and DateUtils class to parse the order date. Additionally, to handle the visibility of views, we need to include the View class too

<data>
   <import type="org.fossasia.openevent.app.utils.DateUtils" />
   <import type="android.view.View" />

   <variable
       name="presenter"
       type="org.fossasia.openevent.app.event.checkin.contract.IAttendeeCheckInPresenter" />

   <variable
       name="checkinAttendee"
       type="org.fossasia.openevent.app.data.models.Attendee" />
</data>

 

Then, we make the root layout to be CoordinatorLayout and add a NestedScrollView inside it, which contains a vertical linear layout in it. This vertical linear layout will contain our fields.

Note: For brevity, I’ll skip most of the layout attributes from the blog and only show the ones that correspond to the text

Firstly, we show the attendee name:

<TextView
   style="@style/TextAppearance.AppCompat.Headline"
   android:text='@{attendee.firstName + " " + attendee.lastName }'
   tools:text="Name" />

 

The perks of using data binding can be seen here, as we are using string concatenation in layout itself. Furthermore, data binding also handles null checks for us if we add a question mark at the end of the variable name ( attendee.firstName? ).

But our server ensures that both these fields are not null, so we skip that part.

Next up, we display the attendee email

<TextView
   android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.email }"
   tools:text="xyz@example.com" />

 

And then the check in status of the attendee

<TextView
   android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.checkedIn ? @string/checked_in : @string/checked_out }"
   android:textColor="@{ checkinAttendee.checkedIn ? @color/light_green_500 : @color/red_500 }"
   tools:text="CHECKED IN" />

 

Notice that we dynamically change the color and text based on the check in status of the attendee

Now we begin showing the fields with icons to their left. You can use Compound Drawable to achieve this effect, but we use vector drawables which are incompatible with compound drawables on older versions of Android, so we use a horizontal LinearLayout instead.

The first field is the order status denoting if the order is completed or in transient state

<LinearLayout android:orientation="horizontal">

   <ImageView app:srcCompat="@drawable/ic_transfer" />
   <TextView android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.order.status }" />
</LinearLayout>

 

Now, again for keeping the snippets relevant, I’ll skip the icon portion and only show the text binding from now on.

Next, we include the type of ticket attendee has. There are 3 types of ticket supported in Open Event API – free, paid, donation

<TextView
   android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.ticket.type }"  />

 

Next, we want to show the price of the ticket, but only when the ticket is of paid type.

I’ll include the previously omitted LinearLayout part in this snippet because it is the view we control to hide or show the field

<LinearLayout
   android:visibility='@{ checkinAttendee.ticket.type.equalsIgnoreCase("paid") ? View.VISIBLE : View.GONE }'>

   <ImageView app:srcCompat="@drawable/ic_coin" />
   <TextView
       android:text='@{ "$" + checkinAttendee.ticket.price }'
       tools:text="3.78" />
</LinearLayout>

 

As you can see, we are showing this layout only if the ticket type equals paid

The next part is about showing the date on which the order took place

<TextView
   android:text="@{ DateUtils.formatDateWithDefault(DateUtils.FORMAT_DAY_COMPLETE, checkinAttendee.order.completedAt) }" />

 

Here we are using internal DateUtils method to format the date into complete date time from the ISO 8601 standard date present in the order object

Now, we show the invoice number of the order

<TextView
   android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.order.invoiceNumber }" />

 

Lastly, we want to show how the ticket was paid for via

<LinearLayout
   android:visibility='@{ checkinAttendee.order.paidVia.equalsIgnoreCase("free") ? View.GONE : View.VISIBLE }'>

   <ImageView app:srcCompat="@drawable/ic_ray" />
   <TextView  android:text="@{ checkinAttendee.order.paidVia }" />
</LinearLayout>

 

Notice that here too we are controlling the visibility of the layout container and only showing it if the ticket type is paid

This ends our vertical linear layout showing the fields about attendee detail. Now, we add a floating action button to toggle the check in status of attendee

<FrameLayout
   android:layout_gravity="top|end">

   <android.support.design.widget.FloatingActionButton
       android:layout_gravity="center"
       android:onClick="@{() -> presenter.toggleCheckIn() }"
       app:backgroundTint="@{ checkinAttendee.checkedIn ? @color/red_500 : @color/light_green_500 }"
       app:srcCompat="@{ checkinAttendee.checkedIn ? @drawable/ic_checkout : @drawable/ic_checkin }"
       app:tint="@android:color/white" />

   <ProgressBar
       android:layout_gravity="center" />

</FrameLayout>

 

We have used a FrameLayout to wrap a FAB and progress bar together in top end of the bottom sheet. The progress bar shows the indeterminate progress of the toggling of attendee status. And you can see the click binder on FAB triggering the presenter method toggleCheckIn() and how the background color and icon change according to the check in status of the attendee.

This wraps up our layout design. Now we just have to create a BottomSheetDialogFragment, inflate this layout in it and bind the attendee variable and we are all set. The result with all fields visible looks like this:

To learn more about bottom sheet and android data binding, please refer to these links:

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Smart Data Loading in Open Event Android Orga App

In any API centric native application like the Open Event organizer app (Github Repo), there is a need to access data through network, cache it for later use in a database, and retrieve data selectively from both sources, network and disk. Most of Android Applications use SQLite (including countless wrapper libraries on top of it) or Realm to manage their database, and Retrofit has become a de facto standard for consuming a REST API. But there is no standard way to manage the bridge between these two for smart data loading. Most applications directly make calls to DB or API service to selectively load their data and display it on the UI, but this breaks fluidity and cohesion between these two data sources. After all, both of these sources manage the same kind of data.

Suppose you wanted to load your data from a single source without having to worry from where it is coming, it’d require a smart model or repository which checks which kind of data you want to load, check if it is available in the DB, load it from there if it is. And if it not, call the API service to load the data and also save it in the DB there itself. These smart models are self contained, meaning they handle the loading logic and also handle edge cases and errors and take actions for themselves about storing and retrieving the data. This makes presentation or UI layer free of data aspects of the application and also remove unnecessary handling code unrelated to UI.

From the starting of Open Event Android Orga Application planning, we proposed to create an efficient MVP based design with clear separation of concerns. With use of RxJava, we have created a single source repository pattern, which automatically handles connection, reload and database and network management. This blog post will discuss the implementation of the AbstractObservableBuilder class which manages from which source to load the data intelligently

Feature Set

So, first, let’s discuss what features should our AbstractObservableBuilder class should have:

  • Should take two inputs – disk source and network source
  • Should handle force reload from server
  • Should handle network connection logic
  • Should load from disk observable if data is present
  • Should load from network observable if data is not present is disk observable

This constitutes the most basic data operations done on any API based Android application. Now, let’s talk about the implementation

Implementation

Since our class will be of generic type, we will used variable T to denote it. Firstly, we have 4 declarations globally

private IUtilModel utilModel;
private boolean reload;
private Observable<T> diskObservable;
private Observable<T> networkObservable;

 

  • UtilModel tells us if the device is connected to internet or not
  • reload tells if the request should bypass database and fetch from network source only
  • diskObservable is the database source of the item to be fetched
  • networkObservable is the network source of the same item

Next is a very simple implementation of the builder pattern methods which will be used to set these variable fields

@Inject
public AbstractObservableBuilder(IUtilModel utilModel) {
    this.utilModel = utilModel;
}

AbstractObservableBuilder<T> reload(boolean reload) {
    this.reload = reload;

    return this;
}

AbstractObservableBuilder<T> withDiskObservable(Observable<T> diskObservable) {
    this.diskObservable = diskObservable;

    return this;
}

AbstractObservableBuilder<T> withNetworkObservable(Observable<T> networkObservable) {
    this.networkObservable = networkObservable;

    return this;
}

 

UtilModel is the required dependency, and so is added as a constructor parameter.

All right, all variables are set up, now we need to create the build function to actually create the observable:

@NonNull
public Observable<T> build() {
    if (diskObservable == null || networkObservable == null)
        throw new IllegalStateException("Network or Disk observable not provided");

    return Observable
            .defer(getReloadCallable())
            .switchIfEmpty(getConnectionObservable())
            .compose(applySchedulers());
}

Reloading Logic

First of all, we check if the caller forgot to add disk or network source and throw an exception if it is actually so. Next, we use defer operator to defer the call to getReloadCallable() so that this function is not executed until this observable is subscribed. Some articles over the internet directly use combine operators from Rx to make things easy, but this lazy calling is the most efficient way to do things because no actual call will be made to observables.

Secondly, you can easily test the behaviour in unit tests, by verifying that

  • no call to the network observable was made if the data inside disk observable was present; or
  • call to network observable was made even if there was data in disk observable if the reload request was made

These tests would not have been possible if we did not employ the lazy call technique because the calls to the observables and utilModel would have been made before the subscription to this model happen, in order to create this observable eagerly.

Now, let’s see what getReloadCallable does

@NonNull
private Callable<Observable<T>> getReloadCallable() {
    return () -> {
        if (reload)
            return Observable.empty();
        else
            return diskObservable
                .doOnNext(item -> 
                    Timber.d("Loaded %s From Disk on Thread %s",
                    item.getClass(), Thread.currentThread().getName()));
    };
}

 

This function’s role is to return the disk observable if the request is not a reload call, or else return an empty observable, so that force network request happens to reload the data

So it returns a Callable which encapsulates this logic, and besides that, it also adds a log if loading from disk about the type of item loaded and the thread it was loaded on

Connection and Database Switch Logic

In the next chain of operation, we make a switchIfEmpty call to getConnectionObservable(). Because of the above reloading logic, switchIfEmpty serves 2 purpose here, it changes to API call:

  • if db does not contain data
  • If it is a reload call

The observable we switch to is returned by getConnectionObservable() and its purpose is to check if the device is connected to the internet, and if it is, to forward the network request and if it is not, then return an Error Observable.

@NonNull
private Observable<T> getConnectionObservable() {
    if (utilModel.isConnected())
        return networkObservable
            .doOnNext(item -> Timber.d("Loaded %s From Network on Thread %s",
                item.getClass(), Thread.currentThread().getName()));
    else
        return Observable.error(new Throwable(Constants.NO_NETWORK));
}

We use util model to determine if we are connected to internet and take action accordingly. As you can see, here too, we log about the data being loaded and the thread information.

Threading

Lastly, we want to ensure that all processing happens on correct threads, and for that, we call compose with an Observable Transformer to make all requests happen on I/O scheduler and the data is received on Android’s Main Thread

@NonNull
private <V> ObservableTransformer<V, V> applySchedulers() {
    return observable -> observable
        .subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())
        .observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread());
}

And that’s all it takes to create a reactive, generic and reusable data handler for disk and network based operations. In the repository pattern we have employed in the Open Event Android Orga Application, all our data switching and handling code is delegated to it, with unit tests and integration tests testing the individual and cross component working in all cases.

If you want to learn more about other implementations, you can read these articles

Continue ReadingSmart Data Loading in Open Event Android Orga App