Question

I have android application that is written “regular” way. layouts, java, APK.

Now, depending on some factors I want data to be presented differently to different users with different preferences, etc. Doing it using XML layouts will be very problematic in couple of reasons:

1. Upgrade issue – we have bunch of users and they not good at upgrading.
2. Hard to maintain and code.

So, I’m toying with idea of “templates” where we can serve templates from server and just use device to generate those.

1. Web app won’t work because our data available offline in case there is no connection.
2. There is buttons and stuff that user can press to call regular Activities and do things.

I envision something like:
HTML 5 template with {tags} that I will populate from data. I will receive tempaltes and data separately from server. I will merge that data and display on UI.

Now my question is how do I:

1. Display HTML5 inside Activity
2. Intercept button push in HTML in my Java code?

Is this bad idea to write something like this?

Answer 1

It sounds reasonable to me. You can use a WebView for displaying the content. Your app can manage a cache of downloaded templates and other content and display it in the web view either from the web site or from the cache if offline.