CSc 317 - News Search - PA 7

Topics

• Fragments
• JSON
• Fetching from web

Overview

In this programming assignment, you should create an application that can be used to search for and browse through news articles. You can name the application “News”. When application begins, the user should be presented with a simple user interface, including the title of the application, a text field and search button, and then the remaining space can be used to display the search results. The user should be able to complete one-keyword searches to get articles related to that topic, browse through them, and even view the entire article on the original website.

Take a close look at the animation, demonstrating how the application should work. Take note of a few things in particular:

• As already mentioned, the UI that the user should be presented with initially should contain a title, text field, search button, and extra space to show results.
• The results should be displayed using a ListView. You also should create an appropriate Adapter, and data structure(s), as necessary. Each result in the result list should include the article’s Original website, and the author.
• When the user selects an article, the user should be taken to another view, that displays the article title, a previous of the article text, and a button that can be pressed on, to should the user the original article.
• If the user pressed the button, the application should display the original article using a WebView.
• If the user navigates back to the search page, their most recent search term should be preserved, and the results should update accordingly, if necessary.
• The user can change the search term, and click the search button to start the search. When the results are ready, they should be displayed.
• The application should display recent articles, from the past seven days.
• You should only use one, bare-bones Activity for this application. You should utilize fragments for the majority of the UI functionality. More on this later.
• You do not need to use the exact same colors, fonts, etc, but the general layout and functionality of the application should closely resemble what is shown in the animation.
• When navigating through the UI, the system back button should behave as one might expect - taking the user through the history stack of active Fragments.

The News API

You should use the News API to complete news article searches. The news API was already mentioned in-class, and there was even an activity asking you to use it. In order to use the API, you’ll have to get an API key. for the flickr API, you were all able to use the same key, but for this one, you should create your own account to get an API key. Thankfully, newsapi.org does not ask for a significant amount of personal information to set up an account - just name, email, password, user-case, and having to agree to a few things.

After creating an account, you should be able to find your API key.

In order to make a search for this application, you’ll want to use a URL along the lines of the following:

https://newsapi.org/v2/everything?sortBy=publishedAt&q=SEARCH_TERM&from=START_DATE&apiKey=API_KEY

You should:

• Replace SEARCH_TERM with the single-word search term that the user types in into the text box.
• Replace START_DATE with a date string of the format YYYY-MM-DD, where the date represents one week prior to the present day.
• Replace API_KEY with your API key.

As long as you submit a valid request, you receive the results in JSON format. You can navigate the results using the JSONObject and JSONArray classes.

Development Strategy

(1) Create the search Fragment

As a first step after generating the project, create a new Fragmen class with the appropriate UI components. This should include a title, EditText, search button, and a ListView to use to display the search results. Then, add an activity transaction to get the Fragment displaying on the view.

(2) Get searching working

Next, create an AsyncTask that you can use to search using the News API. In order to search as you should, you’ll need to:

• Calculate a data of 1 week prior for the search range, in the format of YYYY-MM-DD.
• Grab the text from the EditText search
• Have your API key

You should assemble all of these things into a search URL for the news API, and them execute the search. After receiving the results, use the JSONObject and JSONArray classes to access the results and display them in the ListView. You are expected to use a ListView with an Adapter for this.

(3) Clicking on an article

Next, create another Fragment class that can be used for displaying a preview of an article. The Fragment should contain a title, a TextView for the article preview, and a button. Then, you should update the code in the activity and/or the previously-created fragment so that when a result is clicked on, a fragment is created and displayed to preview the article. You should use another Fragment transaction for this.

(4) Viewing the original article

You should create a third Fragment with a WebView for viewing the original article. Clicking on the “Read On . . .” button should cause one of these fragments to be created an displayed.

Rules

For this application, you should target:

• Pixel 2 and/or 3
• API level 28
• Min screen width/height of 1080x1920 (1080p)

Submission

This is due at 7pm on October 26th at 7pm. Use the Android Studio Zip feature to zip up the assignment. Then, submit the zip file to gradescope. Note that there are not automated tests for this PA, so please ensure that your app works how the specification says it should!