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Build dynamic user interfaces with Android and XML

Collect data using an Android forms engine

Frank Ableson, Entrepreneur, MSI Services, Inc.
W. Frank Ableson is an entrepreneur living in northern New Jersey with his wife Nikki and their children. His professional interests include mobile software and embedded design. He is the author of Unlocking Android (Manning Publications, 2010), and he is the mobile editor for Linux Magazine.

Summary:  A number of websites cater to non-profits that provide easily set-up and used forms for taking polls and collecting data. This tutorial introduces a simple architecture for designing similar applications for Android—dynamic user interfaces that allow non-programmers to collect data from mobile users. You will create an example forms engine in this tutorial with both server and mobile sides.

Date:  07 Sep 2010
Level:  Intermediate
PDF:  A4 and Letter (1212 KB | 42 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity:  82615 views
Comments:  

Before you start

You should be comfortable constructing Android applications with the Android SDK to get the most from this tutorial. After completion, you will have learned how to perform application-to-web server communications with HTTP(S) and how to parse XML with the DOM parser. Along the way, you will create custom and dynamic user interface layouts, multi-threaded communications, message handlers, and progress dialogs. To a lesser degree, you will learn about AndroidManifest.xml and server side scripting.

About this tutorial

Frequently used acronyms

  • API: Application Programming Interface
  • DOM: Document Object Model
  • HTML: HyperText Markup Language
  • HTTP(S): Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure
  • IDE: Integrated development environment
  • SAX: Simple API for XML
  • SDK: Software Development Kit
  • UI: User Interface
  • URL: Uniform Resource Locator
  • XML: Extensible Markup Language

This tutorial introduces an architecture for dynamic forms for mobile data collection on Android devices. I will begin with a high level architecture and discussion of where such an application fits in the larger context of data collection. A sneak peak at the completed project, including every source file, provides a road map to where the tutorial is taking you. In cooking-show fashion, you build the application from the ground up with each Java class carefully introduced and related to other aspects of the application, most notably the data model upon which this forms engine is constructed. To conclude, you save form data to the server and look briefly at the server side of the application.

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Prerequisites

Table 1 shows the tools required for this project.


Table 1. The necessary tools for the job
ToolComment
Eclipse and ADTPrimary code editor and Android Developer Tools Plugin.
Android SDKAndroid Software Developer Kit.
Web serverAny variety that supports PHP. You can easily port the script to another server environment.

I created the code samples for this tutorial on a MacBook with Eclipse 3.4.2 and Android SDK version 8, which supports the Android release labeled 2.2. The tutorial code is not leveraging any specific features of this SDK and the application should run just fine in Android versions dating back as far as 1.5. See Resources for links to all the tools.

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static.content.url=http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/js/artrating/
SITE_ID=1
Zone=XML, Web development, Industries, Mobile development
ArticleID=516603
TutorialTitle=Build dynamic user interfaces with Android and XML
publish-date=09072010
author1-email=fableson@msiservices.com
author1-email-cc=dhatten@us.ibm.com

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