Prevent Android Activity from Operating while using Bottom Sheet in PSLab App

This blog demonstrates how to prevent the Android Activity in the background from operating while the Bottom Sheet is up in the foreground. The demonstration will be purely from the work I have done under PR #1355 in PSLab Android repository.

Why prevent the Activity from operating?

When using Bottom Sheet in Android, it is preferable to dim the screen behind the Bottom Sheet to provide a good user experience. But the dimming of the screen is itself an indication that the screen won’t work. Also, if the Bottom Sheet is open and while sliding it, if, by mistake, any button in the background of the bottom sheet gets pressed, then if the function related to that button starts executing then it can create a bad user experience.

For example, in PSLab Android app, in Accelerometer instrument, there are record/pause and delete buttons in the toolbar as shown in figure 1. Now, if the bottom sheet is opened and while closing it if the delete button is by mistake pressed by the user, then whole recorded data gets deleted. Thus, it’s a good practice to prevent the background Activity from operating while Bottom Sheet is opened.

Figure 1. Accelerometer Instrument in PSLab Android app

How to prevent the Activity from operating?

In this demonstration, I will use the method followed by PSLab Android app in creating a Bottom Sheet and making the background dim using a View widget. A step by step guide on how to make a Bottom Sheet as in PSLab Android app can be found in [1] and [2].

Strategy

The strategy used in solving this problem is setting an OnClickListener to the View that is used to dim the background and close the Bottom Sheet (if open) and hide the View as soon as the method is called. The View is again made visible when an upward slide gesture is made to open the Bottom Sheet.

Follow the below steps to get the desired results:

  • First, in OnCreate() method, set the OnTouchListener to the view.
view.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
@Override
public void onClick(View v) {
                              if(bottomSheetBehavior.getState()==BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_EXPANDED)
                    bottomSheetBehavior.setState(BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_HIDDEN);
tvShadow.setVisibility(View.GONE);
      }
});
  • Now, override the OnSlide() method of the GestureDetector class and add the following code to it.
@Override
public void onSlide(@NonNull View bottomSheet, float slideOffset) {
    Float value = (float) MathUtils.map((double) slideOffset, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.8);
    view.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
    view.setAlpha(value);
   }

So, now test the Bottom Sheet and you will find that the Bottom Sheet will get closed as soon as the click is made outside it if it is opened. The demonstration of the working of the above code is shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. Demonstration of preventing the background Activity from operating while Bottom Sheet is up

Resources

  1. http://thetechnocafe.com/make-bottom-sheet-android/: Blog on how to make a Bottom Sheet in Android

Continue ReadingPrevent Android Activity from Operating while using Bottom Sheet in PSLab App

Making Bottomsheet responsive using Custom Gesture Detector in PSLab Android App

In the previous blog Creating Instruction Guide using Bottomsheet, I have created the Bottom Sheet guide in instrument activities in PSLab Android app. But simply adding the Bottom Sheet in the layout is not enough as it could lead to some UI issues like no proper way to show or hide the Bottom Sheet, therefore, he/she will find it difficult to work with Bottom Sheet that could degrade User Experience.

We need to make the Bottom Sheet responsive and interactive which we can do by capturing swipe gestures done by the user and overriding their functionality i.e. when the user slides up with the finger then the Bottom Sheet will reveal itself and when the user slides the finger down the Bottom Sheet will hide.

For this Android provides a class GestureDetector which is used with another class SimpleOnGestureListener which acts as a listener to capture Gesture events like swipe, pinch, scroll, long press etc.

In this blog, I will create a custom gesture listener that will listen to the swipe events and according to the gestures it will show/hide the Bottom Sheet.

I will start by creating a gesture listener class called “SwipeGestureListener” extending the class ‘GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener’ and also as I need swipe gestures to control the Bottom Sheet, so I will pass the reference of the Bottom Sheet as a parameter in the constructor.

public class SwipeGestureListener extends GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener{
   private  BottomSheetBehavior bottomSheet;

   public SwipeGestureDetector(BottomSheetBehavior bt) {
       bottomSheet = bt;
   }  
}

Now in this listener class as we are concerned with the swipe events so will only override the below method provided by ‘GestureDetector.SimpleOnGestureListener’ interface

public boolean onFling(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float velocityX, float velocityY)

This method is called whenever the user swipes its finger in any direction.

In the above code, we can see that the method provides with object e1 and e2 of type MotionEventThe MotionEvent class is used to report movements in terms of Action Codes like ACTION_DOWN, ACTION_UP and also contains other information about the touch like the pressure of the touch, x and y coordinate, orientation of the contact area etc. 

The e1 object will have the attribute values relating to the point when the swipe started and the e2 object will have attribute values relating to the point when the swipe has ended.

Now, the main thing we need to determine if the direction of the swipe which is not directly available using the MotionEvent object.

So, to determine the direction of the swipe I will fetch the coordinates of the initial point and terminal point of the swipe using the objects initial and final point i.e., e1 and e2.

//Initial Point
float x1 = e1.getX(), y1 = e1.getY();

//Final Point
float x2 = e2.getX(), y2 = e2.getY();

Then, using these coordinates to calculate the angle of the swipe and based on the angle I will return the direction of the swipe as shown in the code below

private Direction getDirection(float x1, float y1, float x2, float y2) {

       Double angle = Math.toDegrees(Math.atan2(y1 - y2, x2 - x1));

       if (angle > 45 && angle <= 135)
           return Direction.TOP;
       if (angle >= 135 && angle < 180 || angle < -135 && angle > -180)
           return Direction.LEFT;
       if (angle < -45 && angle>= -135)
           return Direction.DOWN;
       if (angle > -45 && angle <= 45)
           return Direction.RIGHT;

       return null;     // required by java to avoid error
   }

As of now, I have the direction of the swipe so I will apply switch case and handle the swipe up and swipe down gesture as below:

  1. When the user slides up:-  Show the Bottom Sheet by changing the state of the Bottom Sheet from STATE_HIDDEN to STATE_COLLAPSED(partially viewable).
                                          
  2. When the user slides down: – Hide the Bottom Sheet by changing the state of the Bottom Sheet to STATE_HIDDEN.

For doing this, we will modify the onFIing()’ method as shown below

@Override
public boolean onFling(MotionEvent e1, MotionEvent e2, float velocityX, float velocityY) {
   switch (getDirection(e1.getX(), e1.getY(), e2.getX(), e2.getY())) {
       case TOP:
           bottomSheet.setState(BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_COLLAPSED);
           return true;
       case LEFT:
           return true;
       case DOWN:
           if(bottomSheet.getState()==BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_COLLAPSED){
               bottomSheet.setState(BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_HIDDEN);
           }
           return true;
       case RIGHT:
           return true;
       default:
           return false;
   }
}

Now, the custom gesture listener is implemented but it cannot start listening to the touch event on its own, so we need to resolve this by performing the following steps:

  1. Firstly, we need to create an object of class GestureDetector and pass the current activity context and the object of class ‘SwipeGestureListener’ as parameters. Also while creating the listener for ‘SwipeGestureListener’ we need to pass the object of the Bottom Sheet in it as a parameter.

    GestureDetector gestureDetector = new GestureDetector(this, new SwipeGestureListener(bottomSheetBehavior)); 
  2. Then we need to override the ‘onTouchEvent()’ method of our Activity and pass the event which is received as a parameter to the GestureDetector.
    Doing this will pass the touch event that it received to the GestureDetector for it to handle.

    @Override
    public boolean onTouchEvent(MotionEvent event) {
       gestureDetector.onTouchEvent(event);                
       return super.onTouchEvent(event);
    }
    

The Bottom Sheet is now responsive to the gestures on the screen and this will improve the User Experience.

Resources

  1. Detect Common Gestures – Android Developer Article –  Android documentation
  2. Choreographic animations with Android’s Bottom Sheet – Blog by Orkhan Gasimli

 

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Creating Instruction Guide using Bottomsheet

The PSLab android app consists of different instruments like oscilloscope, multimeter, wave generator etc and each instrument has different functionality and usage so it is necessary that there should be an instruction guide for every instrument so that the user can easily read the instruction to understand the functionality of the instrument.

In this we will create an instruction guide for the Wave Generator which will contain information about the instrument, it’s functionalities, steps for how to use the instrument.

The main component that I used to create instruction guide is Bottom SheetBottom Sheet is introduced in Android Support v23.2 . It is a special UI widget which slide up from the bottom of the screen and it can be used to reveal some extra information that we cannot show on the main layout like bottom menus,  instructions etc.

They are of two types :

  1. Modal Bottom Sheet:–  This Bottom Sheet has properties very similar to normal dialogs present in Android like elevation only difference is that they pop up from the bottom of screen with proper animation and they are implemented using BottomSheetDialogFragment Class.

  2. Persistent Bottom Sheet:– This Bottom Sheet is included as a part of the layout and they can be slid up and down to reveal extra information. They are implemented using BottomSheetBehaviour Class.

For my project, I used persistent Bottom Sheet as modal Bottom Sheet can’t be slid up and down by the swipe of the finger whereas persistent Bottom Sheet can be slid up and down and can be hidden by swipe features.

Implementing the Bottom Sheet

Step 1: Adding the Dependency

To start using Bottom Sheet we have to add the dependency (We have also include Jake Wharton-Butterknife library for view binding but it is optional.)

dependencies {

   implementation fileTree(include: ['*.jar'], dir: 'libs')

   implementation "com.android.support:appcompat-v7:26.0.1"
   implementation "com.android.support:design:26.0.1"
   implementation "com.jakewharton:butterknife:8.8.1"

   annotationProcessor "com.jakewharton:butterknife-compiler:8.8.1"

Step 2: Creating Bottom Sheet layout file

In this step, we will create the layout of the Bottom Sheet, as our purpose of making Bottom Sheet is to show extra information regarding the instrument so we will include ImageView and TextView inside the layout that will be used to show the content later.

Some attributes in the layout worth noting are:

  • app:layout_behavior: This attribute makes the layout act as Bottom Sheet.
  • app:behavior_peekHeight: This is the height of the Bottom Sheet when it is minimized.
  • app:behavior_hideable: Defines if the Bottom Sheet can be hidden by swiping it down.

Here, we will also create one extra LinearLayout having height equal to the peek_height. This  LinearLayout will be at the top of the BottomSheet as shown in Figure 1 and it will be visible when the BottomSheet is in a minimized state(not hidden). Here we will put text view with like “Show guide” and an arrow pointing upwards so that it is easier for the user to understand that sheet can be viewed by sliding up.

Figure 1 LinearLayout containing textview and imageview

Here is the gist[2] that contains code for the layout of the Bottom Sheet guide

After this step, we can see a layout of Bottom Sheet in our Android Editor as shown in Figure 2

Figure 2 shows the layout of the Bottom Sheet

Step 3: Creating the Container view layout containing content and Bottom Sheet

For container view, we will create new layout under Res Layout and name it “container_view_wavegenerator.xml”

In this layout, we will use ‘Coordinator Layout’ as ViewGroup because persistent Bottom Sheet is implemented using BottomSheetBehavior class which can only be applied to the child of ‘CoordinatorLayout’.

Then add the main layout of our instrument and the layout of the Bottom Sheet inside this layout as its child.

<android.support.design.widget.CoordinatorLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
   android:layout_width="match_parent"
   android:layout_height="match_parent">

   <include layout="@layout/activity_wave_generator" />

   <include layout="@layout/bottom_sheet_custom" />

Step 4: Setting Up Bottom Sheet and Handling callbacks

Now we will head over to the “WaveGenerator.java” file(or any instrument java file)Here we will handle set up Bottom Sheet and handle callbacks by using following classes:

BottomSheetBehavior provides callbacks and makes the Bottom Sheet work with CoordinatorLayout.

BottomSheetBehavior.BottomSheetCallback() provides the callback when the Bottom Sheet changes its state. It has two methods that need to be overridden:

  1. public void onSlide(@NonNull View bottomSheet, float slideOffset)

    This method is called when the Bottom Sheet slides up and down on the screen. It has slideOffset as a parameter whose value varies from -1.0 to 0.0 when the Bottom Sheet comes from the hidden state to collapsed and 0.0 to 1.0 when it goes from collapsed state to expanded state.

  2. public void onStateChanged(@NonNull View bottomSheet, int newState)

    This method is called when BottomSheet changed its state. Here, let us also understand the different states which can be attained by the Bottom Sheet:

    • BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_EXPANDED : When the Bottom Sheet is fully expanded showing all the content.
    • BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_HIDDEN : When the Bottom Sheet is hidden at the bottom of the layout.
    • BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_COLLAPSED : When the Bottom Sheet is in a collapsed state that is only the peek_height view part of the layout is visible.
    • BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_DRAGGING : When the Bottom Sheet is dragging.
    • BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_SETTLING : When the Bottom Sheet is settling either at expanded height or at collapsed height.

We will implement these methods in our instrument class, and also put the content that needs to be put inside the Bottom Sheet.

@BindView(R.id.bottom_sheet)
LinearLayout bottomsheet;
@BindView(R.id.guide_title)
TextView bottomSheetGuideTitle;
@BindView(R.id.custom_dialog_schematic)
ImageView bottomSheetSchematic;
@BindView(R.id.custom_dialog_desc)
TextView bottomSheetDesc;

BottomSheetBehavior bottomSheetBehavior;

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { 
              
           //main instrument implementation code

           setUpBottomSheet()
}

private void setUpBottomSheet() {

   bottomSheetBehavior = BottomSheetBehavior.from(bottomsheet);

    bottomSheetGuideTitle.setText(R.string.wave_generator);
   bottomSheetSchematic.setImageResource(R.drawable.sin_wave_guide);
   bottomSheetDesc.setText(R.string.wave_gen_guide_desc);

  bottomSheetBehavior.setBottomSheetCallback(new 
  BottomSheetBehavior.BottomSheetCallback() {
       @Override
       public void onStateChanged(@NonNull View bottomSheet, int newState) {
           if (newState == BottomSheetBehavior.STATE_EXPANDED) {
               bottomSheetSlideText.setText(R.string.hide_guide_text);
           } else {
               bottomSheetSlideText.setText(R.string.show_guide_text);
           }
       }

       @Override
       public void onSlide(@NonNull View bottomSheet, float slideOffset) {
           Log.w("SlideOffset", String.valueOf(slideOffset));
        }
      });
}

After following all the above steps the Bottom Sheet will start working properly in the Instrument layout as shown in Figure 3

Figure 3 shows the Bottom Sheet in two different states

To read more about implementing Bottom Sheet in layout refer this: AndroidHive article- working with bottomsheet

Resources

  1. Developer Documentation – BottomSheetBehaviour
  2. Gist containing xml file for layout of Custom Bottomsheet

Continue ReadingCreating Instruction Guide using Bottomsheet