Mobile Software Development | Android App

Objectives
This assessment item relates to the learning outcome 1, 2 and 3. More specifically, to design and implement a complex mobile application.

The objective of this assignment is for students to:

• Develop, test and maintain a mobile application using an integrated suite of mobile software development tools. More specifically Android Java development is undertaken using Android Studio and Android API’s.

Introduction

You are assigned the task of creating a data logger to capture inventory location data in a mobile application that stores the data in a local database. The app has fields to record data for items owned by the company were the app is employed to capture time, location and condition data for items in the companies’ inventory. After the name of the staff member entering the data is given, a page (fragment) is shown to record data values for the items in the inventory. An entry consists of inventory data. When the Save Log Entry button is pressed this data is saved locally in an application SQLDatabase. When the Show Log Entries button is pressed a related page (fragment) is shown that list all the date/time, location and data entries made for that item. We will refer to our app as InventoryLogs.

More details of these pages will be given in the sections below. You should also consult the weekly lecture/tutorials on the Moodle website for help and more information on completing the assignment. The tutorials contain step-by-step procedures for working through the assignment as well as some tips and extra help and clarification of the specification. Make sure you read the lecture/tutorials on the Moodle website

The specification of this app will be further refined in Assignment 2.

Mobile Application Home Startup Page

The application start-up page (Home_fragment) is shown in Fig. 1. You are to implement this functionality using the Android API. The application should be based on a single activity with multiple fragments used to present various other views (fragments). The User name: TextEdit field is used for an employer authorised to collected inventory information to enter information on subsequent pages (fragments). Only if a user name has been entered does a click on the Next button result in switching to the inventory data entry page (fragment). If no user name is entered the toast message shown on the right of Figure 1 should be displayed. The inventory data entry page fragment/s is discussed in the next section

Inventory Data Entry Page

The page has large text for the pages name, Inventory Item, at the top of the view area. In the figures below the lines of data that are to be logged and saved are shown.

The line immediately below the title line has the text “Invoice# “, followed by an EditText field to enter the invoice number with the hint Invoice number. This is followed by a button field with the label ADD ITEM. Then there is the label Quality with a spinner that is used to select one of the possible qualities {“”, “Failed”, “Poor”, “Average”, “Good”}. When the spinner is pressed a drop down list is shown and the selected item displayed.The layout and a sample input is shown in figure 2.

The ADD ITEM button is used is used to add the invoice number and quality strings to an internal data object that saves the values. The current time is added to this data when the ADD ITEM button is pressed.

The SHOW ITEMS button is used to present all the log entries in a list format as shown in the next section. If a value (invoice number, time, or quality) does not have a value then a Toast error message must be displayed indicating the problem, how to fix it, and the entry should not be saved. If the entry is saved an appropriate dialog should be given.
                                      

                                                                                                                                 

SHOW ITEMS Page (Fragment)

This fragment contains a list view with each of the specific users invoice number, time, and quality entered for every item entered shown as a list item. Every saved entry for that user is displayed in the list like this. A user may have more than one entry during so multiple entries can appear in the list, as shown in figure 3 on the right. At the bottom of the page is a button that returns the user to the invoice data entry page. Note this buttons’ text is customised with the name BACK TO ADD INVOICES

Options Menu pages

A number of menu options should be shown, if the user presses the console Menu button, as shown in Fig. 4.

If the user taps the Save Menu then all data in the inventory list should be saved to a SQLite database on the mobile device. Typically this is done when the user finishes entering data for the day. When the application is opened, this database is used to intialise previously saved inventory’ logger entries to that given in the database. Subsequently new values are added to the app as the user enters new data.

The Send all entries will be used for other purposes in the next assignment, but for now we will use it to clear the current database of all inventory entries. This would typically be done at the end of the week.

Profile page

The Profile fragment UI is shown in the Fig. 5. A Username edit text field is supplied to enter their username. Two text fields are also supplied so that the user can enter their associated password for this username. When the Save profile button is pressed this data is to be saved in local variables (for use in the next assignment) and the Home page (fragment) is shown. If the Cancel profile button is pressed the Home page is returned to. The intention of this is to allow for authentication to a company database at a later stage of development of this app.

Other Features

When the Send menu option is chosen the dialog shown on the left of the Fig. 6 is shown. If the “OK” button is selected then the existing SQLite database is cleared of all entries along with the local objects used to save the inventory entries. As a result, subsequently showing the list the inventory will present an empty list.

When the Android Back Button is pressed on the Android device the dialog on the right of the figure below is presented. If the user taps the “Yes” button then the local inventory logs will be written to the SQ Lite database before quitting the application. If the “No” button is tapped then the application exits without saving any changes to the SQ Lite database. The intent is that when the user sends the data the database is cleared

Required Documentation

You are also to prepare a Word document. Your document should include an appropriate title page. Your document should have two sections that address the hardware and software requirements and application commentary given below

Hardware and Software Requirements

Your document should:

• Create a list of mobile devices and manufacturers targeted for the application. You should state what mobile devices where used to test the application and what version of Android is supported.

Application Commentary

Your document should:

• List the features you successfully implemented and those you were unable to successfully implement; you should describe the problem in a few sentences and also briefly describe anything you attempted to do to get it to work. Your approach to identifying and attempting to fix these bugs may gain you some partial credit for those features you were unable to implement.

• A description of any additional functionality you believe would be useful to add to this app should be included. Explain what the features are, and how they would help to improve the app.

Submission

You are required to submit your assignment electronically via the Moodle course website. The deliverable is a rar or zipped directory containing all the code and resources needed for testing. You must rar or zip (or tar) together:

• Locate your Android Studio project and zip or rar this folder.

• Your Word document

The resulting rar or zip file should be submitted on the course website. Please note that you should use your student number as the name for your rar or zip file when uploading to Moodle.