DPSD - Android Project 2

Step 1: Designing Screens

First convert your wireframes into activities and fragments supporting styles for a minimum of two resolutions. (Please refer to link http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html for popular screen sizes and densities.)

If you are creating your activities using the WYSIWYG editor then make sure of the following:

All Android Resources are identified by their id in Java source code.

Declarative approach on Resources

@+id/tableRow1

Means - that ID tableRow1 will create if it does not already exist.

Formal structure

@[package:]type/name type

refers to drawable, attr, id, layout, etc in R.java

Be careful not to use duplicate names in entire project as these are declared static.

Declare each referencable User Interface and Activity with its own String Declarative

For e.g.

android:text="@string/billTotal"
android:textColor="#000"
<TextView android:id="@+id/billTextView"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="@string/billTotal"
android:textColor="#000"
android:gravity="right"
android:paddingRight="5dp"></TextView>


Use the following convention to name each activity:

PackageName_ActivityName.xml

Step 2: Designing Presentation Tier (Mainly for Input/Output)

• It is a good idea to organize code for each intent using a separate file for each defined activity.
• If an intent involves usage of two activities the presentation code then the code can be placed in either activity file.
• If it makes sense you can / should create sub packages for application sub components.

Step 3: Designing Content Provider(For Storage)

• Create DB Schema (if one is required) for storing data locally. Represent the schema using Crow Notation or UML Notation.
• Please make sure you are following rules of Database Normalization when appropriate.
• Setup a package called DBLayout in your src folder and add a class for each entity's CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete Operation).

Step 4: Designing Application Tier (for business logic)

• Design entities and relationship between them. These would be placed in your entities package.
• This step should create objects to be utilized in presentation tier. The object should be exposed to presentation tier using a set of business method.
• I encourage you to not ignore this hard design requirement. I have seen several Android Apps that look like scripts with a single file populated with inner classes and methods that belong to business logic layer
• Properly design your listeners and other classes and place them in the appropriate package(s).
  
• You should think about using interfaces and abstract classes as appropriate to expose functionality to presentation layer.

Step 5: Designing Integration Tier

• Separate out interactions with applications on same device or remote devices.
• Create a package called wservices for organizing your Integration Tier.
• Create subpackages called local or remote for local and remote services.
• Create interfaces for local and remote services for both client and server side.
• If you are accessing an existing service like Facebook then write interfaces for local service(s).