reating a Simple Rss Application in Android (V2)

June 1, 2013Veaceslav GrecLeave a commentGo to comments

This is a refactored version of a previous rss application example which had 1 major issue and gathered some discutions around that tutorial.
Starting with Android 3.0 and higher when trying to perform a network operation from the UI thread, the NetworkOnMainThreadException is thrown. The previous example did not address this issue. Why? Well… the tutorial didn’t have the purpose to present a stable application from all points of view, its main intention was to show how to use the XmlPullParser to parse an XML file.
The new tutorial fixes that issue, and along with that brings some improvements that will make this example easily adaptable to your specific needs.

What is new in version 2:
a) The RSS content is downloaded and parsed in an IntentService, thus it does not block anymore the UI thread.

b) The application now uses Fragments, thus being able to handle properly configuration changes like screen orientation, while performing the background work.

c) The application uses a custom adapter instead of built in ArrayAdapter. This will allow us to work with custom objects, rather than using string arrays like in previous example.

d) The rss parser was modified and now the code is much simpler. With minor adjustments it can be easily adapted to parse a different rss feed.

Requirements didn’t change, we still need to parse the PCWorld’s rss feed (http://www.pcworld.com/index.rss) and display the headlines in a ListView. When clicking on a list item, the built in web browser opens and user is redirected to the corresponding article.