Actually, I've been looking at the various ways to do this "infinite" pagination, and even though the human notion of time is that it is infinite (even though we have a notion of the beginning and end of time), computers deal in the discrete. There is a minimum and maximum time (that can be adjusted as time goes on, remember the basis of the Y2K scare?).
Anyways, the point of this discussion is that it is/should be sufficient to support a relatively infinite date range through an actually finite date range. A great example of this is the Android framework's CalendarView
implementation, and the WeeksAdapter
within it. The default minimum date is in 1900 and the default maximum date is in 2100, this should cover 99% of the calendar use of anyone within a 10 year radius around today easily.
What they do in their implementation (focused on weeks) is compute the number of weeks between the minimum and maximum date. This becomes the number of pages in the pager. Remember that the pager doesn't need to maintain all of these pages simultaneously (setOffscreenPageLimit(int)
), it just needs to be able to create the page based on the page number (or index/position). In this case the index is the number of weeks that the week is from the minimum date. With this approach you just have to maintain the minimum date and the number of pages (distance to the maximum date), then for any page you can easily compute the week associated with that page. No dancing around the fact that ViewPager
doesn't support looping (a.k.a infinite pagination), and trying to force it to behave like it can scroll infinitely.
new FragmentStatePagerAdapter(getFragmentManager()) {
@Override
public Fragment getItem(int index) {
final Bundle arguments = new Bundle(getArguments());
final Calendar temp_calendar = Calendar.getInstance();
temp_calendar.setTimeInMillis(_minimum_date.getTimeInMillis());
temp_calendar.setFirstDayOfWeek(_calendar.getStartOfWeek());
temp_calendar.add(Calendar.WEEK_OF_YEAR, index);
// Moves to the first day of this week
temp_calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_YEAR,
-UiUtils.modulus(temp_calendar.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK) - temp_calendar.getFirstDayOfWeek(),
7));
arguments.putLong(KEY_DATE, temp_calendar.getTimeInMillis());
return Fragment.instantiate(getActivity(), WeekDaysFragment.class.getName(), arguments);
}
@Override
public int getCount() {
return _total_number_of_weeks;
}
};
Then WeekDaysFragment
can easily display the week starting at the date passed in its arguments.
Alternatively, it seems that some version of the Calendar app on Android uses a ViewSwitcher
(which means there's only 2 pages, the one you see and the hidden page). It then changes the transition animation based on which way the user swiped and renders the next/previous page accordingly. In this way you get infinite pagination because it just switching between two pages infinitely. This requires using a View
for the page though, which is way I went with the first approach.
In general, if you want "infinite pagination", it's probably because your pages are based off of dates or times somehow. If this is the case consider using a finite subset of time that is relatively infinite instead. This is how CalendarView
is implemented for example. Or you can use the ViewSwitcher
approach. The advantage of these two approaches is that neither does anything particularly unusual with the ViewSwitcher
or ViewPager
, and doesn't require any tricks or reimplementation to coerce them to behave infinitely (ViewSwitcher
is already designed to switch between views infinitely, but ViewPager
is designed to work on a finite, but not necessarily constant, set of pages).