Question

I am developing an app for Android

I have different categories:

String[] cat = { "Category",  "Books", "Clothing", "Shoes", "Hobbies", 
                 "General", "Electronics", "Transportation", "Medicine",
                 "Sports", "Education", "Outdoor"};

The UI asks the user to select a category, Name, and some description which is then written to a db. When the user presses the List button, every category that is filled is shown and the items under that category is also show using an ExpandableListActivity.

List<List<String>> children = new ArrayList<List<String>>();

/**********************
  I have a list for each category!!! But I don't like this solution. :(
**********************/
List<String> books = new ArrayList<String>();
List<String> clothing = new ArrayList<String>();
    ...
    ...

public void fillData() {

// Get all of the notes from the database and create the item list
Cursor c = mDbHelper.fetchAllItems();

startManagingCursor(c);

// for all rows
for(int i=0; i<c.getCount(); i++)
{
    // next row
    c.moveToNext();

    // pick a category
    String t = c.getString(c.getColumnIndex("category"));

    switch (getCat(t))
    {
    case Books:
        books.add(c.getString(c.getColumnIndex("name")));
        break;
    case Clothing:
            // do stuff for Clothing
        break;

     /**
       And there are other cases for the rest of the categories but i am not listing
       them here, since it is the same process
     */
        default:
        break;
    }   // end switch
} // end for loop

    //for each category that has been filled up
    children.add(category);
} // end function

My Question:

is it possible to not have to create a list for each category? I tried with one list but the results do not look very good. All categories show the same items and not the individual items, which makes sense.

Answer 1

i just created a list of lists, and worked 🙂