Android Essentials: Creating Simple User Forms

Android applications often rely upon data supplied by users. This tutorial walks you through the creation and use of a number of the most common controls for collecting data from the user. For this tutorial, you will design and implement a membership registration form.

Android applications often rely upon data supplied by users. This tutorial walks you through the creation and use of a number of the most common controls for collecting data from the user.

For this tutorial, you will design and implement a membership registration form. Whether you’re in charge of recruiting members for an app, an event, or a club, a simple and well-designed member registration form will speed up the registration process, hence encouraging more users to sign up.

App Overview

Layouts in Android define the structure of the user interface (UI) of your application. The UI consists of elements which are built using a hierarchy of views and view groups. A view consists of UI components such as buttons, text boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, images, etc. See the diagram below representing a standard application layout.

Before you begin the design process, you need to give some thought to what kind of data you want to collect from the user. Consider the types of data you want to collect and choose the appropriate types of control.

Our membership form will be for a gym and will collect the following information:

• full name
• gender
• current weight
• height
• goal weight
• age
• phone
• address

Getting Started

Open Android Studio and create a new project with an empty activity. Wait for Android Studio to finish creating your project, and then open app > res > layout > activity_main.xml. This file defines the layout for the user interface (UI).

A UI in Android is defined in XML files. The easiest way to build a UI in Android Studio is with the Android Studio Layout Editor. The Layout Editor writes the XML for you as you drag and drop views to build your layout.

In this project, we will use the ConstraintLayout . A ConstraintLayout is a layout that provides a flexible way for creating views.

Add a Title to the Layout

In the Palette panel, click Text and add it to the design. You might need to move it around so that it stays at the top of the layout.

Any time you drag an element in the visual editor of Android Studio, you will see an error immediately: “This view is not constrained…”. This error simply means that the element is not Constrained and therefore won’t render correctly when you run the App. This only applies to Constraint Layouts.

This TextView control will display the form's description and purpose to the user. This control displays a string resource called @string/member_title , which must be defined within the /res/values/strings.xml string resource file.

 name="app_name">LEXO