Mobile Application Development
COSC2309/2347 Semester 1, 2019
Assignment 2: Movie Night Planner App Extended
(30 marks)
You are to extend the Movie Night Planner Application created in Assignment
1 to include a number of new features described below:
Functional Requirements
- Local Database: The complete model (all events and movie data) is to be
persisted in a local SQLite database. Whilst the database can be simple
(in terms of normalisation), it must store all information about Events
(including attendees) and Movies as discussed in Assignment 1. On
application startup it should read the contents of events.txt and
movies.txt and populate the database if not already present. For
efficiency you should maintain your original in memory model which is
synced (loaded) in onStart() and saved/persisted in onStop()1. For
cohesion, database functionality should reside in classes separate from
the model, view and controller classes. - Context Aware (Location Based) Event Notification: With people
increasingly on the move it is easy to miss an event and nobody wants to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time! Therefore, your application will
provide location-based notifications for upcoming movie events. For
example, if you are one hour’s travel away from the destination of an
upcoming event you should be notified one hour before (plus a
configurable notification threshold of say 15 minutes extra). The
notification should be displayed in the Notification Area and provide
Dismiss/Cancel/Remind in‘n’minutes options (where‘n’is another user
configurable setting i.e. remind again duration). NOTE: Dismiss
means just clear the notification and do not produce any further
notifications, whereas Cancel means actually cancel and remove the
event.
When the user selects Cancel, a confirmation dialog box should be
displayed showing a summary of the event details so that the user can
choose to confirm the permanent removal of the event. If the user does
not confirm the deletion, then the notification is simply dismissed and
the user will be reminded again in ‘n’ minutes.
You can use any of the built in Android APIs to support this but MUST
create your own custom Service to facilitate this functionality e.g. create
either a JobService or use the AlarmManager to launch your own
1 Alternatively you may wish to do this in the background for additional protection against data
loss but this is not required for this assignment
started Service. A notification period with which location and distance is
checked should be the third user configurable setting for this
assignment.
Google Distance Matrix API. To implement (2) you can get the current
location using the GPS of the device and you already have the locations
of all of your events but you need some mechanisms to calculate the time
to travel between two locations using various modes of transport (you can
just use the driving mode for this assignment). Google Distance Matrix
API will be used for this purpose.
This API is a REST based web service, which can be queried using
standard HTTP Get/Post requests and receives JSON formatted
responses (so as to not unnecessarily tie ourselves to Android APIs).
Details on how to use this service can be found in [1] and will be
discussed further in class.
- Display Event Location information on a Google Map: One of the
licensing requirements of using the Distance Matrix API is to display
locations on a Google Map. Android Studio provides a Google Maps
Activity template you can use for this purpose. You should use the Map to
display the location of the three soonest (i.e. closest in time in the future
to the current time) event locations. - Network Monitoring: Since your application can only perform network
related operations (Distance Matrix API) when connectivity is available on
the device you should have a BroadcastRecever that listens for
network state. You should perform an Event Notification check
(requirement 2) whenever network connectivity is re-established.
Additional Implementation Requirements - All non-trivial I/O operations must be performed in a separate worker
thread (i.e. Not the UI Thread). Your implementation must have at least
one AsyncTask and one started Service (which can be an
IntentService). - In addition to the database functionality specified above all user settings
(notification threshold, remind again duration, and notification period)
should be saved using a mechanism other than SQLite e.g.
SharedPreferences or a file. - Your User Interface must support all of the functionalities presented under
the“functional requirements”section of both assignments (Assignments 1
and 2). As with assignment 1 you should aim for a simple/efficient user
interface design and can refer to the Android Material Design UI
Guidelines for more information [2]. - Your implementation must make efficient use of UI resources through
Styles, Themes and XML resources (such as Strings, Dimensions or
Colors) - Your Target Android Version should be API 25 or higher (you must
implement runtime permission checking but can use Caspar’s
supplied code2
).
Code Quality - You will be assessed on code quality using the same guidelines from
assignment 1.
Submission Instructions - You MUST make use of the libraries provided by the default Android SDK
API. You must NOT make use of third-party libraries such as the Google
Client Libraries. - Your project should be implemented using Android Studio and your project
exported as a compressed .zip archive before uploading to Canvas. Do
not use any other compression formats – use of other formats (e.g. tar.gz,
RAR, etc.) may lead to delays in marking and/or a deduction of
assignment marks.
Important Regulations - You are free to refer to textbooks and notes, and discuss the design
issues (and associated general solutions) with your fellow students on
Canvas; however, the assignment should be your own individual work (or
as a student pair as per assignment 1 rules). - Where you do make use of other references, please cite them in your
work. Note that you will only be assessed on your own work so the use