Map Demo (Assignment 2)

The Map Demo (Assignment 2)

Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to give you experience using Eclipse to develop a simple Android application that displays a map given a pair of latitude and longitude coordinates. The application works as follows:

The user is prompted to enter a location as a pair of lat/long coordinates, as shown in the following screenshot:
After the location has been entered, the location is displayed on a map, as shown in the following screenshot:

Note that the results will look somewhat different if you use a real Android smartphone vs. using the AVD emulator shown in the screenshots above.

Program Description

This assignment involves writing an Android program that has the following features:

It contains an MapDemoActivity class that uses a TextView object to prompt for the location and then stores the latitude and longitude in two EditText objects.
It uses a Button object with the label "Show Location" to run the showLocation() method that uses the lat/long values provided by the user to start an activity that displays a map of the location.
The Button that shows the location must be connected to the MapDemoActivity.showLocation() method via the android:onClick="showLocation" attribute.
Make sure to carefully check for errors in the latitude and longitude values entered by the user. If there are any problems with the input please display helpful error messages via Android Toasts or EditView.setError().
The activity that displays the map must be started via an intent and must not be written by you. First try to use the geo: URI intent solution, which should work if you're running on an Android phone (I recommend using the approach described here to see if this works). If the geo: URI intent doesn't work properly then use the http://maps.google.com URI intent instead.

The entire layout of the application must be structured by the contents of the Android resource files described via XML, i.e., you must not hard-code any TextView, EditText, or Button objects into your MapDemoActivity class.

All the lifecycle events associated with your MapDemoActivity class must be logged to LogCat via the Log.d() method, e.g.:

08-26 20:27:48.580: D/MapDemo(3323): onCreate() 08-26 20:27:48.610: D/MapDemo(3323): onStart() 08-26 20:27:48.610: D/MapDemo(3323): onResume() ...

Your MapDemoActivity class should inherit from a parent class called LifecycleLoggingActivity that defines the associated hook methods to perform this logging, as follows: public class LifecycleLoggingActivity extends Activity { public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onRestart() { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onStart() { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onResume() { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onPause() { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onStop() { /* you fill in here. */ } public void onDestroy() { /* you fill in here. */ } }

Concluding Remarks

Information useful for learning how to write this application is available in the the Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development textbook. I recommend you read this material and work through the various tutorials.

If you find it extremely hard to complete this assignment you may not be ready to take this class. If this is the case, I recommend you take the Intermediate Software Design course (CS 251) first since it focuses on the patterns and tactics of effective OO design and programming.

Back to CS 282 home page.