Week 4 Project: Twitter With Fragments

My app is complete, please review. /cc @codepathreview @codepath

Another fun project. I appreciated that we got to build off of last week's project. That allowed me to dig a little deeper this week as I didn't had to build everything from the ground up.

Interesting Notes

I got a progress bar to work inside of a RecyclerView by adding another heterogeneous view for the progress bar. When I wanted to show progress I append a null tweet to the datasource for the adapter. The progress bar view is used when rendering a null tweet. That was fun to figure out.
Thank you Nate for SmartFragmentStatePageAdapter which came in handy!
I thought this part of the life cycle feature of fragments was slick:

public void onAttach(Context context) {     
    super.onAttach(context);     
    if (context instanceof OnTweetsDialogFragmentListener) {         
        mOnTweetsDialogFragmentListener = (OnTweetsDialogFragmentListener) context;     
    } else {         
        throw new RuntimeException(context.toString()   + " must implement OnTweetsDialogFragmentListener");     
    }
 }

It made it easy to have the fragment pick up the fragment listener impeleented by the activity.

Open Questions

Similar to last week - For ActiveAndroid - I had to write some pretty squirrely (maybe even smelly?) code to get the many to one relationships working given the GSON generated model classes. In the following example an Entities model contains an array of media associated with a tweet.

    public static class Entities extends Model {

        List<TweetMedia> media;

        public Entities() {
            super();
        }

        public List<TweetMedia> getMedia() {
            //  if we haven't saved the model yet then use media otherwise
           //  use getMany and hit the db
            if (media == null) {
               return getMany(TweetMedia.class, "Entities");
            } else {
                return media;
            }
        }

        public final Long cascadeSave(Tweet tweet) {
            long retVal = save();
            if (media != null && media.size() > 0) {
                for (TweetMedia med : media) {
                    med.setEntities(this);
                    med.cascadeSave();
                }
            }
            return retVal;
        }
    }

When saving a tweet I have a cascading save method which calls Entities.cascadeSave. In order to get the relationships set correctly - I saved the current entities object first. Then to set up the many to one relationship - enumerated over all the tweet media objects - setting the current entities object on each tweet media model then saving the media object in the media table.

From the if I had more time department

Move JSON parsing and object creation onto a background thread to improve scrolling performance. This would be particularly valuable when saving timeline tweets to the database in a transaction.
When in offline mode - adjust the db queries to filter against just mentions and user timelines. Currently just searching through all saved tweets.
Data binding would have come in handy for this project but I didn't have time.

:+1: nice work. A few notes after checking out the code:

Nice to see you used a drawable and/or styles to customize the view
Nice to see you played around with styling the sliding tab strip
Correctly and appropriately used OnClickListeners on the user's profile image to navigate to their profile view
Good to see you properly communicated the user to the user timeline fragment from the profile activity.
Glad to see you properly hooked up each of the different timelines to infinitely paginate.
Nicely done architecting the fragments (base class and extension classes) such that you put as much code and logic as possible in the base class and then used abstract methods to define only the specific behavior where they differ!

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This week (Week 5), we are going to cover the last major piece to the Android puzzle and that is using the hardware and SDK components such as the camera, photo gallery, location, maps, etc. After that, Week 6 and week 7 we will be covering a few important intermediate topics such as more about styling and animation as well as testing.

Following the bootcamp, we are going to have a public demo day to celebrate the progress you've all made with our next batch of Android students and multiple companies attending to see the group projects that you all have built. We are going to help however we can over the next few weeks to get the team project apps in shape for that.

smacgregor / SimpleTwitterClient