Building a Movie application
The Getting Started tutorial walks you through creating a simple movie application using Electrode Native. We'll use Android for this tutorial. If you wish to use iOS instead, select the iOS tab.
The movie application includes two React Native MiniApps and two APIs:
MovieListMiniApp | This MiniApp displays a list of movies.
MovieDetailsMiniApp | This MiniApp displays the details of a selected movie.
MoviesApi | An API used to retrieve a list of movies.
NavigationApi | An API used to navigate from one MiniApp to another.
The tutorial shows how easy it is to integrate multiple React Native applications into a native application, and how to easily communicate between the JavaScript and the native side using APIs.
Before you begin
Install Android Studio and Electrode Native if they're not already installed.
Download Android 7.0 (Nougat) and accept it's license: 1. In Android Studio go to Tools → Android → SDK Manager 2. Select the “Android 7.0 (Nougat)” checkbox 3. Click “Apply” and follow the prompts:
The manager will download all the dependencies:
Set up an emulator if you want to run the application in an emulator. For more information on how to setup an emulator, you can check the Android documentation
Create a working directory named
ElectrodeNativeTutorial
to hold all tutorial project files
Creating the MovieList MiniApp
1) Move to the working directory and create a MiniApp named MovieListMiniApp
using the ern create-miniapp
command.
2) When asked to enter a package name for this MiniApp, hit enter to use the default name. You may check the package name requirements
3) Move to the MovieListMiniApp
directory and run the MiniApp to view it, using the ern run
command.
4) First time users will need to grant the SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW
permission for ErnRunner app . (Learn More). Once done exit from the ErnRunner app and launch it again from applications.
5) Select an emulator (or device) from the list when prompted.
Once the command completes, you will see your first MiniApp running. If you used React Native previously, you'll notice that this MiniApp is the same as the React Native default starter app--after all, a MiniApp is nothing more than a React Native application!
Now let's update the UI of this MiniApp to display a list of movies.
Updating the MovieList MiniApp UI
1) Open the App.js
file in your favorite JavaScript editor.
2) Replace the content of this source file with the following code.
3) Save your changes to App.js
and reload the application to see the updated UI. Press the R key twice or select Reload from the Developer Menu (⌘M).
Congratulations! You've successfully run and modified the initial UI of the MovieList MiniApp.
Now let's add an API to the MiniApp so that we can retrieve movies from the native application instead of manually hard coding them in the source code of our MiniApp.
Adding the MoviesApi to the MovieList MiniApp
We have already created and published the MoviesApi
and a native implementation of the api for the needs of this tutorial. You may view the created API code in react-native-ernmovie-api repository and the implementation code in ReactNativeErnmovieApiImpl repository. We also created a NavigationApi
that will be of use later in this tutorial, you can view its code in the react-native-ernnavigation-api repository.
1) Add the MoviesApi
, the MoviesApiImpl
, the NavigationApi
and react-native-electrode-bridge as dependencies of MovieListMiniApp, using the ern add
command.
2) Open the App.js
file and modify it as described in the next steps.
3) Import MoviesApi and add it below other import
statements of the JavaScript file:
4) Replace the constructor method with the following code:
5) Save the App.js
file
6) Because we added an API, that contains some native code, we'll need to regenerate the container used by the native application, in order for it to include the native code of the API. This can be done using the run
command which recreates a new local container and launches the application. Enter the following run
command:
The UI displays the movie names that are returned by the native implementation of the movie api.
Using the Navigation API
We will use the NavigationApi
that we already added to our MiniApp earlier on. This very simple API will be used for navigating from the MovieListMiniApp
to the MovieDetailsMiniApp
.
1) Mofify the App.js
file as follows so that when selecting a movie in the list, the MovieListMiniApp
will call the navigation API to navigate to the MovieDetailsMiniApp
to display the details of the selected Movie.
2) Add the following import statement:
3) Replace the render
method with the following method:
4) Add a method below the render
method to send the navigate
request when a movie is selected in the list of movies
5) Save your modification to the App.js
file
6) Implement the NavigationApi
in the native application.
Replace the content of
MainActivity.java
with the following code:
Adding the MovieDetailsMiniApp
To complete the tutorial, add the MovieDetailsMiniApp
to the application.
We've developed and published this MiniApp to reuse it in this tutorial. You may view the code of this MiniApp in the MovieDetailsMiniApp repository.
To add this MiniApp to the local container used by the native application, use a variation of the
ern run
command that allows you to include extra MiniApps to the local Container. Let's do that magic now.
Once the app is launched click on any movie and you will be taken to the details page of MovieDetailsMiniApp.
This is how easy it is to combine multiple MiniApps in a local container!
You've successfully used Electrode Native to build your first native application, composed of multiple MiniApps.
In this tutorial, we've covered only a small part of what Electrode Native offers. Be sure to check the rest of the Electrode Native documentation to learn about all the features that Electrode Native offers.
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