Fragments in Android

Fragments

A fragment represents a behavior or a portion of user interface in an Activity. You can combine multiple fragments in a single activity to build a multi-pane UI and reuse a fragment in multiple activities. You can think of a fragment as a modular section of an activity, which has its own lifecycle, receives its own input events, and which you can add or remove while the activity is running

example :

Creating a Fragment

To create a fragment, you must create a subclass of Fragment(or an existing subclass of it). The Fragment class has code that looks a lot like an Activity. It contains callback methods similar to an activity, such as onCreate(), onStart(), onPause(), and onStop(). In fact, if you're converting an existing Android application to use fragments, you might simply move code from your activity's callback methods into the respective callback methods of your fragment.

Usually, you should implement at least the following lifecycle methods:

onCreate()

The system calls this when creating the fragment. Within your implementation, you should initialize essential components of the fragment that you want to retain when the fragment is paused or stopped, then resumed.

onStart()

The system calls this when it's time for the fragment to draw its user interface for the first time. To draw a UI for your fragment, you must return a View from this method that is the root of your fragment's layout. You can return null if the fragment does not provide a UI.

onPause()

The system calls this method as the first indication that the user is leaving the fragment (though it does not always mean the fragment is being destroyed). This is usually where you should commit any changes that should be persisted beyond the current user session (because the user might not come back).

Most applications should implement at least these three methods for every fragment, but there are several other callback methods you should also use to handle various stages of the fragment lifecycle. All the lifecycle callback methods are discussed in more detail in the section about Handling the Fragment Lifecycle

There are also a few subclasses that you might want to extend, instead of the base Fragment class:

DailogFragment

Displays a floating dialog. Using this class to create a dialog is a good alternative to using the dialog helper methods in the Activity class, because you can incorporate a fragment dialog into the back stack of fragments managed by the activity, allowing the user to return to a dismissed fragment.

ListFragment

Displays a list of items that are managed by an adapter (such as a SimpleCursorAdapter), similar to ListActivity. It provides several methods for managing a list view, such as the onListItemClick callback to handle click events.

PreferenseFragment

Displays a hierarchy of Preferense objects as a list, similar to PreferenseActivity. This is useful when creating a "settings" activity for your application.

Fragment Lifecycle

Resumed

The fragment is visible in the running activity.

Paused

Another activity is in the foreground and has focus, but the activity in which this fragment lives is still visible (the foreground activity is partially transparent or doesn't cover the entire screen).

Stopped

The fragment is not visible. Either the host activity has been stopped or the fragment has been removed from the activity but added to the back stack. A stopped fragment is still alive (all state and member information is retained by the system). However, it is no longer visible to the user and will be killed if the activity is killed.

onAttach()

Called when the fragment has been associated with the activity (the Activity is passed in here).

onCreateView()

Called to create the view hierarchy associated with the fragment.

OnActivityCreated()

Called when the activity's onCreate() method has returned.

onDestroyView()

Called when the view hierarchy associated with the fragment is being removed.

onDetach()

Called when the fragment is being disassociated from the activity.

The flow of a fragment's lifecycle, as it is affected by its host activity, is illustrated by figure 3. In this figure, you can see how each successive state of the activity determines which callback methods a fragment may receive. For example, when the activity has received its onCreate() callback, a fragment in the activity receives no more than the OnActivityCreated() callback.

Once the activity reaches the resumed state, you can freely add and remove fragments to the activity. Thus, only while the activity is in the resumed state can the lifecycle of a fragment change independently.

However, when the activity leaves the resumed state, the fragment again is pushed through its lifecycle by the activity.