Ideas for android navigation bar (below action bar)

Question

I have a design for an app that will have a row of buttons below the action bar. Each button will open a different fragment. I am aware of ViewPagers, but I do not want the swipe between fragments functionality. I know that I can disable this functionality, but at that point is it worth using a ViewPager? I know this is a pretty common design paradigm, so how do most apps handle this sort of thing?

It seems like the ViewPager will provide some nice functionality out of the box, like switching between fragments and what not. So, I am leaning towards using one, but was hoping someone could provide some feedback on this approach.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Keep the buttons in the layout of your main activity. Have them call a function lets say loadFragment(Button button) on click.

This function then handles switching of the fragments, and you can change the display of the navigation buttons inside this function itself to highlight the appropriate button or something equivalent.

Answer 2

Google Design is always worth the reading.

Check http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/swipe-views.html for details.

Answer 3

Personally I have used ViewPager with tab layout for swiping purpose and it makes it easy to me to synchronise the transitions ( tabs and pages) where I put a red circle to the tab corresponding to the viewed page. With this approach I got a clean separated code.