Using Swipe Views to swop pages

Swipe views allow you to change pages by swiping your finger across the screen.

You create Swipe views by using a page viewer and an adapter. The adapter supplies the pages and the page viewer takes care of moving the pages on and off the screen.

We’re using a ViewPager. It’s a layout manager that takes care of the horizontal scrolling. Usually it’s used with fragments, scrolling them on and off screen.

We’re also going to need a page adapter to supply the pages to the ViewPager.

As we’re using fragments, we have two adapter options:

• FragmentPagerAdapter – represents each page as a fragment. The fragment is kept in the fragment manager while it’s still possible that it may be used. This adapter is best used for a small number of fragments. It can use lot of memory as fragments are kept in memory while not displayed
• FragmentStatePagerAdapter – uses fragments to manage the pages. It also saves and restores the fragment’s state. It’s useful for a large number of pages as it uses less memory. Only the state of the fragment is kept in memory and not the whole fragment. It may be a bit slow switching between pages due to it first having to restore their state

We’re going to use the FragmentStatePagerAdapter.