Better to have multiple adapters or multiple activities?

Question

I have a hierarchical data structure. As an example, lets consider my data television shows. Each show has multiple seasons and each season has several episodes. I want to have a list that displays all shows. When a show is clicked the list will then display all seasons for that show and when a season is clicked the list will show all episodes for that season.

OK so with that out of the way, currently I have ONE Activity that implements a Loader through LoaderCallbacks. This loader returns a full hierarchy of data (AKA all shows with all seasons with all episodes). I then use a different ArrayAdapter depending on the level of data I'm on.

Is this the 'right' way to handle this kind of data? Should I instead have a loader and activity and adapter for each level of the data?

Sorry if this is confusing, thank you in advance for your insight.

Answer 1

There really is no right or wrong here. I would go for one activity and adapter per set of data. This will make your activities less complex and make them decoupled from each other. In your case I would have:

• ShowActivity+ShowAdapter
• SeasonActivity+SeasonAdapter
• EpisodeActivity+EpisodeAdapter

Your data model (with Shows, Seasons and Episodes) should be made accessible to the activities and used to initialize each activity and adapter with the correct data.

Once a show has been selected I'd pass on the id of the show to the next activity through the intent bundle, pick up the show id in the SeasonActivity, fetch the relevant seasons from the data model and display them. The same goes for the transition from season to episode.

Using the approach of one activity per list you'll also get nice transitions between activities and don't have to worry about dealing with the back button to navigate up through your hierarchy.