Android: Java Adapters & Loaders

After porting the McRun iOS app to Android, I realized that using a cross platform framework was not going to work for my Bluetooth scanning data collection project as I needed better access to the radio hardware interfaces.  So I developed BlueScan directly on the Android SDK. While I am always a fan of Google's developer documentation, I found that the Java frameworks for adapters and loaders a bit abstract. As such I documented the framework for a very common development scenario: accessing a database and providing the results to a ListView with favorable UI performance.

The following diagram provides the overview of my class implementation to implement this in the BlueScan Bluetooth 4.0 scanner.

I leveraged a number of resources for getting my arms around the framework:

• The Android Programming book by the Big Nerd Ranch team had descriptive examples as well as a good reusable SQLiteCursorLoader class, which I used here.
• Android's android.widget.Adapter.
• The API guide for List View.