Question

I’m making an Android soundboard. I currently have 12 pages for this specific category. Each page has its own activity and each page as 10 buttons.

Someone asked me today why I don’t just use one activity and switch the setcontentview (XML) between the pages rather then having so many activities.

I thought about it and it doesn’t seem like a bad idea. But I’m curious on if it really would be better.

This means that this one activity would have a 100+ switch case statement for its onclick and onlongclick methods. It would have over 200 variables. I would have to add over 200 listeners (although I think i could set the 10 listeners as I load the specific page rather than all at the beginning. I could also release the current ones before the new XML is displayed).

Will Android be able to handle a single activity like this? I plan on adding more sounds so maybe one day I might have 20 pages or so.

Answer 1

Yes, make it all one activity. Different Activities should only really be used for completely different use cases. Consider using a ListView or a GridView, or a ‘ViewPager` inside of one Activity.

If you do end up using a ListView or anything that takes an Adapter, your Activity should look like this:

class MyActivity extends Activity{

 int mySounds[] = {R.raw.s1, R.raw.s2}; //etc. could also be a 2d array, one for each page of sounds.

 protected void onCreate(Bundle b)
 {
   setContentView(R.layout.myactivity);

   ListView lv = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.myactivity_listView);

   lv.setAdapter(new SoundAdapter(this));

 }

class SoundAdapter extends BaseAdapter{
  Context cont;
  SoundAdapter(Context c){
   this.cont = c;
  }

  getView(int id, View convertView){
   if(convertView == null){
     ...
     //inflate view to be a row/gridcell
   }

   convertView.setOnClickListener(new SoundClickListener(mySounds[id]));
  }



}

 class SoundClickListener extends View.OnClickListener{

   int resId;

   public SoundClickListener(int resId)
   {
     this.resId = resId;
   }

   protected void onClick(View v){
     playSoundWithId(resId);
   }

 }

}