Implement activity templates or architectural alternative

Question

Dear Android community, I have a more architectural questions:

• I’m building an app which in the end displays detailed movie information
• Per screen / activity the information of a single movie will be displayed
• The user should be able to switch between movies by swiping which will then display the next / previous movie
• Up front I don’t know the number of required screens / activities

Hence my question is:

What is the best architecture to implement this behaviour?

• Is there a way to define a „template“ activity which then gets filled with new movie data?
• Is it possible to implement a „swiping“ behaviour in this setup?

Thank you very much for your answer

Kind regards

Answer 1

I think this is a very broad question but what it sounds like:

• Use a single activity and fragments to display each movie details
• Add an OnTouchListener to the fragment to detect swipes left and right (Android: How to handle right to left swipe gestures)
• On a swipe detected, make a new instance of the fragment with the new movie and use a sliding animation when transitioning between the two.

I would recommend you look at Googles Navigation architecture component as well, it will make the navigation part between each fragment easier. I would also recommend using ViewModels, Room and LiveData. (https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/) as it will make the whole development faster and hopefully more stable.