In the first article of this series I started walking you through the creation of an end-to-end BlackBerry application that will serve as a mobile front-end to my Knowledge Base sample web application.
The requirements for the mobile application are pretty simple
-
Searching a collection of articles stored in a knowledge base repository,
• By title
• By tags
-
View an article. The article’s visible attributes are
• Title
• Body
• Tags, as a way to connect the article to specific topics
• Author’s name
• Date published
And my building blocks look like this
Implementation
Previously I finished the Application Class and the Home Screen
I will continue now with the rest of the screens.
Tags Screen
The Tags Screen displays a list of the existing tags in the database. Beside each tag there will be a count of the articles the tag applies to.
Search Screen
This screen will allow our users to initiate an articles search by typing one or more words belonging to the article’s title.
The searchArticles function is present in both the Tags Screen and the Search Screen and so far it only pushes the Articles Screen to the top of the stack. Later I will add the code that will request my server-side handler to issue the database query and return any results.
Articles Screen
The Articles Screen shows a list of articles that satisfy the criteria entered on the Search Screen. It can also show a list of recently viewed articles. Clicking on any listed article will bring the Article Screen to the top of the stack.
Since I’m still missing the network routines, I created a few dummy articles in order to test the look and feel of the Articles Screen.
The Article Class is listed below. Note that I’m not paying a lot of attention to encapsulation, since the usage of this class will be restricted to only a few places in the application.
Article Screen
The Article Screen shows the viewable attributes of the article that was selected on the Articles Screen. This is where the user get’s to read the article. This is another place where I use the Article Class shown above.
Options Screen
Finally, the Options Screen allows the user to change the application settings. In terms of settings, so far I can only think of the URL our application will connect to in order to talk to its server counterpart and the number of references to recently viewed articles to keep cached on the device.
What’s next
In the next article of this series I will add the networking code, as well as the code to save a retrieve the application settings. After this, I will move to the server side and take care of the pieces that will handle the communications with the device.
Downloads
Download the source code for this article from the Downloads page.