Multiple screen support for large and small screens

Question

okey , I have read many chapters about this but still I do not know what is the best thing to do for this project.

Here is the situation I have a project [big one :)], and in this project everything is done for screens with resolution of 480 x 800 pixels.

Here is the new requirement :). They ask to support devices with resolution of 240 x 320 pixels(this resolution of layout-small). Well so far so good :), but the problem is the resolution of 240x320 it too small to fit the component with just scaling of layout-normal. I need to have completely new design for the phones with small screens.

This means that if I had text filed R.id.textview1 in layout/main.xml now in layout-small/main.xml I will not have the R.id.textview1 but I will have two now components let say R.id.button1 and R.id.textviewsmall... My point is the code like this will not work cause in layout/main.xml the textview1 exist but in layout-small/main.xml does not , and it will throw exception

((TextView)findViewbyId(R.id.textview1)).setText("something");

of course this what I have explained is very stupid scenarion, I have something really complicated but I hope you get my point what I want to achieve.

The problem is it is too late to implement fragments cause it will be a lot of work that should be done. So I need some guidelines how should I do this...

Any ideas or some design guidelines would be great help, thanks...

Answer 1

Yes you can do like this. In many Application we can manually set such type of layout at we want.

For that you first have to fetch programmatically the Screen Height and Width. Now once if you got it. You can make the Condition in Java file that if the Screen height and Width So and so. Then do this.

Hope you got my Point.

Or

If you want to set the layout by the XML then made the different layout XML as like below:

res/layout/my_layout.xml             // layout for normal screen size("default")        res/layout-small/my_layout.xml       // layout for small screen size
res/layout-large/my_layout.xml       // layout for large screen size
res/layout-xlarge/my_layout.xml      // layout for extra large screen size
res/layout-xlarge-land/my_layout.xml // layout for extra large in landscape orientation
res/drawable-mdpi/my_icon.png        // bitmap for medium density
res/drawable-hdpi/my_icon.png        // bitmap for high density
res/drawable-xhdpi/my_icon.png       // bitmap for extra high density

And after doing that you can manually set the height and width of the specific layout. Hope it will be the solution of your issue.

Still If its not your solution then let me inform. . .

Enjoy. :)

Answer 2

One possible way is to create the layout for small screen and specify the weight attributes then it will adjust itself on large screens as well. If you also use different density images with it then it will probably work for you in most of the cases. here is how you can specify weights within a layout.

<LinearLayout
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:orientation="vertical"
>
 <TextView
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="small"
android:layout_weight="0.2"
android:background="#123" />
<TextView
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_weight="0.8"
android:text="huge"
android:background="#456"
 />
</LinearLayout>