Working on Power Schedule, I wanted to make a short help file, with some formatting. It seems there were several ways of doing this, but I chose to include an embedded HTML file into my application. It seemed easier to just edit an HTML file in an editor.
So let’s get started…

  • first, embed an html file in the app resources. For this, create the “raw” subfolder in “res” folder and add your HTML formatted file:
    Add raw HTML file

  • use a WebView view in your layout file: 
    	<WebView xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
		android:id="@+id/webviewHelp android:layout_width="fill_parent"
		android:layout_height="fill_parent"/>
  • use this code in your activity onCreate() method: 
    		WebView webview = (WebView) findViewById(R.id.webviewHelp);
		webview.loadData(readTextFromResource(R.raw.help), "text/html", "utf-8");

    where readTextFromResource is something like this:

    	private String readTextFromResource(int resourceID)
	{
		InputStream raw = getResources().openRawResource(resourceID);
		ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
		int i;
		try
		{
			i = raw.read();
			while (i != -1)
			{
				stream.write(i);
				i = raw.read();
			}
			raw.close();
		}
		catch (IOException e)
		{
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return stream.toString();
	}

It will look something like this:
HTML file on Android

I hope it helps :)

Related Posts

Zemanta