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Read more about the article Showing only Logged-in Accounts in the Sharing Page of Phimpme Android

Showing only Logged-in Accounts in the Sharing Page of Phimpme Android

In Phimpme Android application, users can edit their pictures and share them to a number of platforms ranging from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc to cloud storage and image hosting sites like Box, Dropbox, Imgur etc.

Desired flow of the application

According to the flow of the application, the user has to add an account first i.e. log in to the particular account that needs to be connected to the application. After that when the user enters the share page for sharing the image, a button corresponding to the connected account is visible in that page which on clicking will share the image to that platform directly.

What was happening previously?

The list of accounts which is present in the account manager of Phimpme Android application is also getting displayed in the share image page. As the list is large, it is difficult for the user to find the connected account from the list. There is not even an indicator whether a particular account is connected or not. On clicking the button corresponding to the non-connected account, an error dialog instructing the user to log in from the account manager first, will get displayed.

How we solved it?

We first thought of just adding an indicator on the buttons in the accounts page to show whether it is connected or not. But this fix solves only a single issue. Find the connected account in that large list will be difficult for the user even then. So we decided to remove the whole list and show only the accounts which are connected previously in account manager. This cleans the flow of the accounts and share in  Phimpme Android application

When a user logins from the account manager, the credentials, tokens and other details corresponding to that accounts gets saved in database. We used realm database for saving the details in our application. As the details are present in this database, the list can be dynamically generated when the user opens share image page. We implemented a function in Utils class for getting the list of logged in accounts. Its implementation is shown below.

public static boolean checkAlreadyExist(AccountDatabase.AccountName s) {

   Realm realm = Realm.getDefaultInstance();

   RealmQuery<AccountDatabase> query = realm.where(AccountDatabase.class);

   query.equalTo("name", s.toString());

   RealmResults<AccountDatabase> result1 = query.findAll();

   return (result1.size() > 0);

}



public static ArrayList<AccountDatabase.AccountName> getLoggedInAccountsList(){

   ArrayList<AccountDatabase.AccountName> list = new ArrayList<>();

   for (AccountDatabase.AccountName account : AccountDatabase.AccountName.values()){

       if (checkAlreadyExist(account))

           list.add(account);

   }

   return list;

}

Additional changes

There are few accounts which don’t need authentication. Those accounts need their respective application to be installed in the user’s device. So for adding those accounts to the list, we added another function which checks whether a particular package is installed in user’s device or not. Using that it adds the account to the list. The implementation for checking whether a package is installed or not is shown below.

public static boolean isAppInstalled(String packageName, PackageManager pm) {

   boolean installed;

   try {

       pm.getPackageInfo(packageName, PackageManager.GET_ACTIVITIES);

       installed = true;

   } catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e) {

       installed = false;

   }

   return installed;

}

                 

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Read more about the article Integration of Flickr in Phimpme Android

Integration of Flickr in Phimpme Android

Flickr is very widely used photo sharing website. So, we added a functionality in Phimpme Android to share the image to Flickr. Using this feature, the user can upload a picture to Flickr, without leaving the application with a single click. The way how we implemented this Flickr in our Phimpme Android application is shown below.

Setting up Flickr API

Flickr provides only an official web API. So we used the flickrj-android library built using the official Flickr API. First of all, we created an application in Flickr App Garden and requested API tokens from here. We noted down the resultant API key and secret key. These keys are necessary for authenticating Flickr in the application.

Steps for Authentication

Establishing the authentication with Flickr requires the following steps as per the official documentation.

  • Getting a request token
  • Getting User Authorization
  • Exchanging the Request Token for an Access Token
  • Use the Access Token with up.flickr.com/services/upload/ to upload pictures.

Authorizing the user of Flickr in Phimpme

As shown in the above picture, a request token has to be generated. Flickrj SDK provides it for us using Flickr object which further is created using the API key and Secret key. This request token is used for directing the user to a page for manually authorizing the Phimpme application to share the picture to his/her Flickr account. In Phimpme Android application, we created the Flickr object as shown below.

Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
OAuthToken oauthToken = f.getOAuthInterface().getRequestToken(
     OAUTH_CALLBACK_URI.toString());
saveTokenSecrent(oauthToken.getOauthTokenSecret());
URL oauthUrl = f.getOAuthInterface().buildAuthenticationUrl(
     Permission.WRITE, oauthToken);

Getting Access Token

After the manual authorization of the application, Flickr returns the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These have to used for making another request to Flickr for getting the “Access Token” which gives us the access to upload the picture to Flickr account. For implementing this, intent data is collected when the application reopens after manual authorization. This data contains the OAuth token and OAuth verifier. These are passed to get Access Token from functions present Flickrj library. In Phimpme Android, we implemented this in following way.

Uri uri = intent.getData();
String query = uri.getQuery();
String[] data = query.split("&");
if (data != null && data.length == 2) {
  String oauthToken = data[0].substring(data[0].indexOf("=") + 1);
  String oauthVerifier = data[1].substring(data[1].indexOf("=") + 1);
  OAuth oauth = getOAuthToken();
  if (oauth != null && oauth.getToken() != null && oauth.getToken().getOauthTokenSecret() != null) {
  Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
  OAuthInterface oauthApi = null;
  if (f != null) {
     oauthApi = f.getOAuthInterface();
     return oauthApi.getAccessToken(oauthToken, oauthTokenSecret,verifier);}
  }
}

Uploading Image to Flickr

As we got the Access Token, we used that for creating new Flickr Object. The upload function present in the API requires three arguments – a file name, input stream and its metadata. The input stream is generated using the ContentResolver present in the Android. The code showing how we implemented uploading to Flickr is shown below.

Flickr f = new Flickr(API_KEY, API_SEC, new REST());
RequestContext requestContext = RequestContext.getRequestContext();
OAuth auth = new OAuth();
auth.setToken(new OAuthToken(token, secret));
requestContext.setOAuth(auth);
UploadMetaData uploadMetaData = new UploadMetaData();
uploadMetaData.setTitle(your file name);
InputStream is = getContentResolver().openInputStream(Uri.fromFile(your file object));
f.getUploader().upload(your file name, is, uploadMetaData);

The full implementation, using AsyncTasks and other well-optimized functions, is available in our Phimpme Android project repo on GitHub.

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