The first time you sign into developerWorks, a profile is created for you. Select information in your profile (name, country/region, and company) is displayed to the public and will accompany any content you post. You may update your IBM account at any time.

All information submitted is secure.

The first time you sign in to developerWorks, a profile is created for you, so you need to choose a display name. Your display name accompanies the content you post on developerworks.

Please choose a display name between 3-31 characters. Your display name must be unique in the developerWorks community and should not be your email address for privacy reasons.

All information submitted is secure.

My developerWorks:

My notifications:

Sign out

Select a language:

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: 106293 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.

Prerequisites

Table 1 shows the tools required for this project.

Table 1. The necessary tools for the job

Tool	Comment
Eclipse and ADT	Primary code editor and Android Developer Tools Plugin.
Android SDK	Android Software Developer Kit.
Web server	Any 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.

Comments