This is more of an overall architecture question about Android, and I’m curious what the community thinks is best practice for this type of endeavor. I am developing an Android application which loads an xml file which is stored on the device. My first question is, when you are dealing with a formatted xml file in the scope of an Android application, and the main point of the application is to sort of “browse” through the nodes of the xml, is it smarter to “load the xml” (not really sure what the term is) into memory and do it that way? Or is it smarter to take the xml, write it to an internal database (still getting used to the whole SQL Lite concept), and then browse through the data that way? The latter seems like a roundabout way, but I’m trying to understand core concepts here.
This brings me to my second question. If I were to draw out how the data from this XML “flows”, the immediate answer in my head as far as what I know about Android is, a bunch of ListViews. Node 1 has 2 choices. This loads two choices into a ListView. When you click on the first node, it goes to the corresponding subnode in the xml, which has, say, four choices. I create a ListView with 4 choices. So on and so forth.
Does this make logical sense? Am I looking at the approach wrong? Is there a better way to do it using a different object that makes more sense? Any references to things that have already been done for me to compare to would be helpful as well. Thanks!!
Don’t convert the XML into a sqlite database. Just parse it in memory.
As far as your other questions, I’d have one activity that extends from
ListActivity. OverrideonListItemClick()and make it start your activity again with some kind of pointer to the next element to browse.Doing it this way will make the activity stack behave well as the user presses the back button.