This week, I’ve done a lot of work on Field Day. It doesn’t seem like much but that’s because I kept getting caught up in tiny errors during coding. The biggest thing that I’ve added to Field Day is part of the Lab Notebook activity. We decided this week that integrating Google Drive is less important than being able to open local files. We decided this because we will not always have internet access in Iceland and that’s essential for Drive if we want to update our files. The Google Drive API for Android also has limited options. The Android API only allows the application to access files that were created by the application itself. Since most of our files are PDFs and the Android API doesn’t allow uploading, we decided to move away from that for now. There’s a Java Client Library for Google Drive which has many more capabilities that we will probably use when we go back to Google Drive.

I’ve begun working on the local documents viewer and have successfully downloading files and displayed the pdfs. There’s now an option to download files where the user provides the URL of the server where the files are and the path to the directory with all of the files in it. The code relies on the directory having indexing enabled. Field Day goes out and queries the directory and returns a list of files and folders. The user is asked to select which files to download. If a folder is selected Field Day goes out and queries that folder, etc. until the user hits ‘Download.’ The files are downloaded and stored on the external storage (the SD card) keeping the directory structure that Field Day saw in the remote directory. A list of files of is displayed on the screen to the user. Upon clicking a file, the file is displayed. Currently it works for only PDFs and JPEGs which are handled as Bitmaps. Text files are not. If a folder is clicked then the folder is opened and the files and/or folders in that folder are displayed.