[Android Bootcamp] Project 0: Todo - Ready for Review

[richardpon]

My app is ready for review. Please review /cc @codepathreview @codepath

Question: Items are persisted as text-position pairs in SQLite. Every time an item is deleted or a new item is added, all items are deleted and saved back to the DB. This makes it simple to maintain proper positioning of each item in the list. The tradeoff is efficiency. This seems fine as the amount of data we expect in this app to be small. What is the best practice?

[nidhi1608]

Richard,

Is there a reason you are trying to maintain positioning of each item? You could simply delete an item from its position and append a new item at the end of the list when an item is added. Alternatively, also consider looking at ActiveAndroid, which makes it easier to work with SQLite.

Everything else looks good! This was intended in part to give you an introduction to the general rhythm of this course. The course is entirely project based with an app being assigned each week and then due the following week. Each project builds on the last to help each engineer to learn all practical Android development and best practices as quickly as possible. We also do a code review for each submitted project.

The next step is to continue working on extensions to your todo app and to schedule a short 5-10 minute phone conversation here. Navigate to today's date and onward from there and choose a 15-minute slot. Let us know if none of those times work.

Once you select a slot, can you make sure to include best number to reach you at? Look forward to chatting soon!

[richardpon]

Hi Nidhi,

Yes, ActiveAndroid is probably a better abstraction for using SQLite than direct. I'll have to look into that for the next revision.

The main reason I decided to maintain item positions is to enable items to be rearranged and new items to be added into the middle of the list. Those would definitely be for another version. Also, storing the position just made more sense to me than a priority.

I scheduled a time to chat for next week. Looking forward to talking with you!

[nidhi1608]

As you mentioned, deleting all records to add an item is quite expensive. The best way probably is to sort by position on the UI after you get the data from SQlite.

Talk to you next week!

[richardpon]

I just submitted an update. Changes include:

1. Using custom adapter using the View Holder pattern for showing the Todo Items
2. Slight UI improvements including an icon for the App and changing the text in the EditView for adding items into a hint
3. Using SQLite is now more efficient as the position field is now relative instead of absolute. I also found this approach easier to use when integrating the custom adapter.

Question:

One of the challenges I faced was how to deal with DB corruption introduced by bugs. It was easy, but time consuming, to examine the DB contents by reading all the items into memory and then inspecting it with the debugger. My hack for clearing the DB was to invoke code in the main activity's onCreate method to just delete all the items.

I actually just discovered the sqlite3 cli tool. Are there any other tools you would recommend for working with the DB?

Thanks!

[nidhi1608]

If you are looking for a move visual tool, you can try using Sqlitebrowser.