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Read more about the article How Settings of SUSI Android App Are Saved on Server

How Settings of SUSI Android App Are Saved on Server

The SUSI Android allows users to specify whether they want to use the action button of soft keyboard as carriage return or else send action. The user can use SUSI.AI on different client like Android , iOS, Web. To give user uniform experience, we need to save user settings on the server so that if the user makes any change in setting in any chat client then that it changes in other chat clients too. So every chat client must store user specific data on the server to make sure that all chat clients access this data and maintain the same state for that particular user and must accordingly push and pull user data from and to the server to update the state of the app.

We used special key to store setting information on server. For eg.

Setting Key Value Use
Enter As Send enter_send true/false true means pressing enter key send message and false means pressing enter key adds new line.
Mic Input mic_input true/false true means default input method is speech but supports keyboard input too. false means the only input method is keyboard input.
Speech Always speech_always true/false true means we get speech output irrespective of input type.
Speech Output speech_output true/false true means we get speech output in case of speech input and false means we don’t get speech output.
Theme theme dark/light dark means theme is dark and light means theme is light

How setting is stored to server

Whenever user settings are changed, the client updates the changed settings on the server so that the state is maintained across all chat clients. When user change setting, we send three parameters to the server ‘key’, ‘value’ and ‘token’. For eg. let ‘Enter As Send’ is set to false. When user changes it from false to true, we immediately update it on the server. Here key will be ‘enter_send’ and value will be ‘true’.

The endpoint used to add or update User Settings is :

BASE_URL+’/aaa/changeUserSettings.json?key=SETTING_NAME&value=SETTING_VALUE&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN’

‘SETTING_NAME’ is the key of the corresponding setting, ‘SETTING_VALUE’ is it’s updated value and ‘ACCESS_TOKEN’ is used to find correct user account. We used the retrofit library for network call.

settingResponseCall = ClientBuilder().susiApi .changeSettingResponse(key, value,  PrefManager.getToken())

If the user successfully updated the setting on the server then server reply with message ‘You successfully changed settings of your account!’

How setting is retrieved from server

We retrieve setting from the server when user login. The endpoint used to fetch User Settings is

BASE_URL+’/aaa/listUserSettings.json?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN’

It requires “ACCESS_TOKEN” to retrieve setting data for a particular user. When user login, we use getUserSetting method to retrieve setting data from the server. PrefManager.getToken() is used to get “ACCESS_TOKEN”.

userSettingResponseCall = ClientBuilder().susiApi .getUserSetting(PrefManager.getToken())

We use userSettingResponseCall to get a response of ‘UserSetting’ type using which we can retrieve different setting from the server. ‘UserSetting’ contain ‘Session’ and ‘Settings’ and ‘Settings’ contain the value of all settings. We save the value of all settings on the server in string format, so after retrieving settings we convert them into the required format. For eg. ‘Enter As Send’ value is of boolean format, so after retrieving we convert it to boolean format.

var settings: Settings ?= response.body().settings

utilModel.setEnterSend((settings?.enterSend.toString()).toBoolean())

Reference

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Read more about the article Building Preference Screen in SUSI Android

Building Preference Screen in SUSI Android

SUSI provides various preferences to the user in the settings to customize the app. This allows the user to configure the application according to his own choice. There are different preferences available such as to select the theme or the language for text to speech. Preference Setting Activity is an important part of an Android application. Here we will see how we can implement it in an Android app taking SUSI Android (https://github.com/fossasia/susi_android) as the example.

Firstly, we will proceed by adding the Gradle Dependency for the Setting Preferences

compile 'com.takisoft.fix:preference-v7:25.4.0.3'

Then to create the custom style for our setting preference screen we can set 

@style/PreferenceFixTheme

as the base theme and can apply various other modifications and color over this. By default it has the usual Day and Night theme with NoActionBar extension.

Now to make different preferences we can use different classes as shown below:

SwitchPreferenceCompat: This gives us the Switch Preference which we can use to toggle between two different modes in the setting.

EditTextPreference: This preference allows the user to give its own choice of number or string in the settings which can be used for different actions.

For more details on this you can refer the this link.

Implementation in SUSI Android

In SUSI Android we have created an activity named activity_settings which holds the Preference Fragment for the setting.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>


<fragment

  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

  xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"

  android:id="@+id/chat_pref"

  android:name="org.fossasia.susi.ai.activities.SettingsActivity$ChatSettingsFragment"

  android:layout_width="match_parent"

  android:layout_height="match_parent"

  tools:context="org.fossasia.susi.ai.activities.SettingsActivity"/>

The Preference Settings Fragment contains different Preference categories that are implemented to allow the user to have different customization option while using the app. The pref_settings.xml is as follows

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

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

  xmlns:app="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res-auto"

  android:title="@string/settings_title">


  <PreferenceCategory

      android:title="@string/server_settings_title">

      <PreferenceScreen

          android:title="@string/server_pref"

          android:key="Server_Select"

          android:summary="@string/server_select_summary">

      </PreferenceScreen>

  </PreferenceCategory>


  <PreferenceCategory

      android:title="@string/settings_title">

      <com.takisoft.fix.support.v7.preference.SwitchPreferenceCompat

          android:id="@+id/enter_key_pref"

          android:defaultValue="true"

          android:key="@string/settings_enterPreference_key"

          android:summary="@string/settings_enterPreference_summary"

          android:title="@string/settings_enterPreference_label" />

  </PreferenceCategory>

All the logic related to Preferences and their action is written in SettingsActivity Java class. It listens for any change in the preference options and take actions accordingly in the following way.

public class SettingsActivity extends AppCompatActivity {


  private static final String TAG = "SettingsActivity";

  private static SharedPreferences prefs;


  @Override

  protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

      super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

      prefs = getSharedPreferences(Constant.THEME, MODE_PRIVATE);

      Log.d(TAG, "onCreate: " + (prefs.getString(Constant.THEME, DARK)));

      if(prefs.getString(Constant.THEME, "Light").equals("Dark")) {

          setTheme(R.style.PreferencesThemeDark);

      }

      else {

          setTheme(R.style.PreferencesThemeLight);

      }

      setContentView(R.layout.activity_settings);


  }

The class contains a ChatSettingFragment which extends the PreferenceFragmentCompat to give access to override functions such as onPreferenceClick. The code below shows the implementation of it.

public boolean onPreferenceClick(Preference preference) {

              Intent intent = new Intent();

              intent.setComponent( new ComponentName("com.android.settings","com.android.settings.Settings$TextToSpeechSettingsActivity" ));

              startActivity(intent);

              return true;

          }

      });


      rate=(Preference)getPreferenceManager().findPreference(Constant.RATE);

      rate.setOnPreferenceClickListener(new Preference.OnPreferenceClickListener() {

          @Override

          public boolean onPreferenceClick(Preference preference) {

              startActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=" + getContext().getPackageName())));

              return true;

          }

      });
}

For diving more into the code we can refer to the github repo of Susi Android (https://github.com/fossasia/susi_android).

Resources

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Read more about the article Addition Of Settings Page Animations in Open Event Android App

Addition Of Settings Page Animations in Open Event Android App

In order to bring in some uniform user flow in the  Open Event Android  there was a need to implement slide animation for various screens. It turned out that the settings page didn’t adhere to such a rule. In this blog post I’ll be highlighting how this was implemented in the app.

Android Animations

Animations for views/layouts in android were built in order to have elements of the app rely on real life motion and physics. These are mainly used to choreograph motion among various elements within a page or multiple pages. Here we would be implementing a simple slide_in and a slide_out animation for the settings page. Below I highlight how to write a simple animator.

slide_in_right.xml 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<set

   xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
   <translate
       android:duration="@android:integer/config_shortAnimTime"
       android:fromXDelta="100%"
       android:toXDelta="0%" />

</set>

This xml file maily is what does the animation for us in the app. We just need to provide the translate element with the position fromXDelta from where the view would move to another location that would be toXDelta.

@android:integer/config_shortAnimTime is a default int variable for animation durations.

Here toXDelta=”0%” signifies that initial position of the page i.e the settings page that is the screen itself. And the 100% in fromXDelta signifies the virtual screen space to the right of the actual screen(OUTSIDE THE SCREEN OF THE PHONE).

Using this animation it appears that the screen is sliding into the view of the user from the right.

We will be using overridePendingTransition to override the default enter and exit animations for the activities which is fade_in and fade_out as of Android Lollipop.

The two integers you provide for overridePendingTransition(int enterAnim, int exitAnim) correspond to the two animations – removing the old Activity and adding the new one.

We have already defined the enterAnim here that is slide_in_left. For the exit animation we would define another animation that would be stay_in_place.xml that would have both fromXDelta and toXDelta as 0% as their values. This was done to just avoid any exit animation.

We need to add this line after the onCreate call within the SettingActivity.

@Override
 protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

       //Some Code
       super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
       overridePendingTransition(R.anim.slide_in_right,    R.anim.stay_in_place);
     //Some Code

Now we are done.

We can see below that the settings page animates with the prescribed animations below.

Resources

 

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