Attachment disappears after e-mail sent programatically

I banged my head in the wall for about an hour to fix this issue.

I wrote a small function in Android that let the user send an e-mail from my application. Everything worked just fine, but when the e-mail was sent the attachment disappeared (the attachment appeared within the GMail client on the android device before sending).

Solution: use the external storage (SD Card) instead of the application cache. The GMail client probably can't access the application cache folder, buf for some reason it shows as if the attachment is OK in the client).

Android's ListView performance for large list

I needed to use a large ListView however the performance of the ListView loading time was very poor. Since I've used SimpleAdapter to map the data to the layout I was forced to populate all the data when creating the SimpleAdapter.

The solution I've decided to take is creating an adapter specific for the task, which populate the data from the objects only during creation of the item's view.

This is the pseudo code (note that the object data retrieval should by lazy too):

public class MyObjectAdapter extends BaseAdapter {
 private ArrayList mData;
 private int mResource;
 private LayoutInflater mInflater;

 public TimeZoneDisplayAdapter(Context context, ArrayList data,
   int resource) {
  mData = data;
  mResource = resource;
  mInflater = (LayoutInflater) context.getSystemService(Context.LAYOUT_INFLATER_SERVICE);
 }

 @Override
 public int getCount() {
  return mData.size();
 }

 @Override
 public Object getItem(int position) {
  return mData.get(position);
 }

 @Override
 public long getItemId(int position) {
  return position;
 }

 @Override
 public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
  View v;
  if (convertView == null) 
   v = mInflater.inflate(mResource, parent, false);
  else
   v = convertView;
   
  bindView(position, v);
  return v;
 }

 private void bindView(int position, View view) {
  MyObject o = mData.get(position);
  
  ((TextView)view.findViewById(R.id.list_item_resource_id)).setText(o.getData1());
  ......
  ......
  ......
 }
}

Note: there are few examples online how to load data to ListView using threads. This wasn't my problem, and it's like killing a fly with a sledge-hammer. The loading time of a specific item was very short, the problem was that there were simply too many items to load at construction time.

Making TextView clickable (http)

The problem: I had a TextView which I wanted to make clickable, and open a web browser.

1. Brute force solution: change the TextView style to blue & underline. Set the onClick event to open web browser.

2. The following code:

SpannableString s = SpannableString.valueOf(entryText);
URLSpan span = new URLSpan(urlText);
s.setSpan(span, 0, entryText.length(), Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
mTextView.setText(s);
mTextView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());