Question

I’m working on an application where in layout layout-small-portrait I want to launch different fragments contained in a single “container activity”, named SingleActivity. I will handle this differnetly in layouts layout-land, layout-large etc. but that is unrelated to my problem.

I have an activity MainActivity which is, as the name indicates, the main activity (launcher) of my application. This will initially contain a ListFragment with different items for the user to press.

Based on the item that the user presses the SingleActivity will launch and its content will correspond to a specific Fragment related to this item. My problem starts here. When the user presses an item I have a reference to the corresponding fragment I want to be displayed in SingleFragment. Illustrated below:

  String tag = myFragmentReference.getTag();
  Intent i = new Intent(this, SingleActivity.class);
  i.putExtra(SingleActivity.CONST_TAG, tag);
  startActivity(i);

The activity launches successfully. In SingleActivity I have the following onCreate() method:

...

// Retrieve the fragment tag from the intent
String tag = getIntent().getStringExtra(CONST_TAG);
Fragment fragment = getSupportFragmentManager().findFragmentByTag(tag);

if(fragment == null) {
    // always end up here, this is my problem.
}

FragmentTransaction ft = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction();
ft.add(R.id.fragmentContainer, fragment);
ft.commit();

...

I suspect that the fact that fragment is always null is because the fragment has not been inflated yet. If I am right what I need to do is define a fragment’s tag before it is inflated, so that it can be found by findFragmentByTag(). Is that possible?

If anything is unclear please let me know.

I look forward to hearing some good ideas! If there are better or more clever ways to implement this I would love to hear your thoughts! Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

Since you are jumping to another activity, it will have its own Fragment BackStack and that fragment will not exist.

You will have to inflate the fragment in the new activity something along these lines:

String tag = intent.getStringExtra(CONST_TAG);

    if (getSupportFragmentManager().findFragmentByTag(tag) == null) {
        Fragment fragment = Fragment.instantiate(this, tag, extras);
        FragmentTransaction ft = getSupportFragmentManager().beginTransaction();
        ft.add(R.id.fragmentContainer, fragment, tag);
        ft.commit();
    }

The tag string will need to have the package location of the fragment such as “com.android.myprojectname.myfragment”