Cross Navigation

Written by: Quincy Williams

Cross navigation between the different portions of the application was one of my main focus' this week. This required allowing the user to be able to get to other portions of the app in situations that we deemed would be useful for the user to navigate to beside the traditional flow of the app.

We achieved this by adding buttons to certain views, such as the routine play activity, that would allow the user to get to the timer function, the one rep max calculator and the plate calculator, as these pieces of the app would be useful to have when a use was is working out. These buttons are available for the user in the top right for this activity but there are other places where they were added as well.

An issue that I ran into with this was navigating between a class that extends an activity and a class that extends a fragment. I initially tried to use a fragment manager object to navigate to each fragment but they  I was able to work with one of my teammates to figure out how to move to fragments from a an activity using intents from the NavigationDrawer task and passing it a specific layout ID so the application knew where to navigate to based on that layout ID that it was passed via intent.putExtra.

I still have the issue with the fact that fragments do not have a back button and will not generate one when navigating to one either, so I will need to look further into getting the user the ability to be able to go back to the routine play function once they use one of the buttons from that activity. Fragments also do not allow for the onBackPressed() function to be called also, so the user would currently have to use the original app flow to be able to navigate back to routine play. This would not be the most ideal use of the cross navigation that we would like to have worked out for the final product.