CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidxmlandroid-listview
KungWaz
KungWaz

Reputation: 1956

Create list in android app

I want to know a good way to create a list in my android app. I have all info in my DB and want to load data from it each time I start the app and make a list from it (id and title).

What is the best approach?

Should I make a PHP-script that responds with a JSON encoded array with all list items or should I make an XML-file that generates each time the data in the DB changes that I import to the app each time it starts? or any other good way to do it?

Since all stuff are made by XML-files in android it feels like importing a XML would be a good thing, is it? And how do I import an XML-file from a web server into the app?

// Daniel

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1320

Answers (2)

Stuart Blackler
Stuart Blackler

Reputation: 3772

In your situation I would pick JSON over XML for all the reason's stated in the following post: http://ajaxian.com/archives/json-vs-xml-the-debate

Plus, in android, there are JSON Array's built in by default so you don't have to do any extra passing of the code.

return new JSONArray("my json string goes here...");

Since we are talking about a mobile device, I would always generate changes in your php script rather than have a full sync as this will be a lot smaller in size that a full sync. However, you will need to give your user a option to do a full re-sync if this is applicable to your app. I would use a SQLite database to store the data and only update the changes in that.

To also make the stream smaller, you can gzip compress your output from php as this can be natively read by the android device. In my app, I compress 500kb down to ~110kb before transmitting, a huge saving on performance. Here a partial example of how to read the stream:

InputStream in = null;
HttpURLConnection httpConn = null; // you will have to write your on code for this bit.

if (httpConn.getContentEncoding() != null) 
{
String contentEncoding = httpConn.getContentEncoding().toString();
if (contentEncoding.contains("gzip")) 
{ 
    in = new GZIPInputStream(httpConn.getInputStream());
}
} 
else 
{ 
    in = httpConn.getInputStream();
}

I hope that this all makes sense, it's been a long day programming :)

Stu

Upvotes: 0

Matthew
Matthew

Reputation: 44919

You can use either JSON or XML.

You can use the web service approach or you can include your db with your application.

In fact, I most often choose to create a sqlite3 database of my data and include it in the assets folder, which can be copied to the app's data folder on startup.

As for copying your sqlite3 database from assets/ to the db data directory, I found these instructions helpful.

Upvotes: 1

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