Question

I am working with Android Fragments pretty extensively and one of the problems I am having is the lack of proper mechanism to pass complex objects to it.

In the android developers documentation for Fragments, they have a static method called newInstance called with some simple arguments which will be packaged into a Bundle and used inside the Fragment. However this method cannot be employed for passing complex objects.

Because I have been using the Fragments api a lot, it is becoming more and more important to have complex objects passed to it. One way to do this is by implementing the Parcelable interface, which I don’t want to do for all the classes.

So, I thought I could do this :

• Define an interface like this in the Fragment:

// Container Activity must implement this interface
public interface ReceiveDataInterface {
  public MyClass getData(uniqueFragmentID);
}

Force the Activities using this fragment to implement the interface and call ReceiveDataInterface.getData(getArgument.getString(UNIQUEID))

• In the Activity instantiate fragment using the newInstance method by passing a uniqueFragmentID and implement the ReceiveDataInterface which gives data based on uniqueFragmentID.

Is it a good idea to do this? if not, why? and how should I go about doing this?

Note:This is done in the same lines as OnArticleSelectedListener described in the documentation.

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

We use this approach for any app we build for android. It works well. I havent tested every method of doing this, but i think this is among the best way.