Inheriting ActionBarSherlock and Android YouTubePlayer

Question

I've developed an app for playing youtube videos using ActionBarSherlock.

Now that the YouTubePlayer api for android is available (here), I want to integrate this into my app to improve playback and controls.

I've run into an issue, in that I need to use multiple inheritance for my activity to both extend SherlockActivity and also YouTubeBaseActivity.

I checked out this article to try to understand multiple inheritance in Java, but frankly it's over my head.

If I attempt to do something like this I get the issue that I can't instantiate SherlockActivity.

Anyone have some concrete example of how to extend both classes? Has anyone had to extend both SherlockActivity and some other class, and how did you accomplish?

Answer 1

I had the same problems - I wanted to add YouTube player to my app, but albo I don't wanted to delete Sherlock from it (based on support library). And what is bad, I wasnt able to use any of the playbers, because I got errors (inflating fragment, YouTubePlayerView cant start without special Activity and so on).

What worked: I used SherlockFragmentActivity, FragmentManager (getSupportFragmentManager()) and YouTubePlayerSupportFragment. Instead of adding it to XML, I created everything from code. My layout looks like this:

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
tools:context=".MainActivity" >

<LinearLayout
    android:id="@+id/fragmentz"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:orientation="vertical" >
</LinearLayout>

<TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"
    android:layout_centerVertical="true"
    android:text="@string/hello_world" />

and Java code:

package com.example.youtubetesting;

import com.actionbarsherlock.app.SherlockFragmentActivity;
import com.google.android.youtube.player.YouTubeInitializationResult;
import com.google.android.youtube.player.YouTubePlayer;
import com.google.android.youtube.player.YouTubePlayer.OnInitializedListener;
import com.google.android.youtube.player.YouTubePlayerSupportFragment;
import com.google.android.youtube.player.YouTubePlayer.Provider;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.support.v4.app.FragmentManager;
import android.support.v4.app.FragmentTransaction;

public class MainActivity extends SherlockFragmentActivity {

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

    FragmentManager fragmentManager = getSupportFragmentManager();
    FragmentTransaction fragmentTransaction = fragmentManager
            .beginTransaction();

    YouTubePlayerSupportFragment fragment = new YouTubePlayerSupportFragment();
    fragmentTransaction.add(R.id.fragmentz, fragment);
    fragmentTransaction.commit();

    fragment.initialize("Your API KEY HERE",
            new OnInitializedListener() {

                @Override
                public void onInitializationSuccess(Provider arg0,
                        YouTubePlayer arg1, boolean arg2) {
                    if (!arg2) {
                        arg1.loadVideo("wKJ9KzGQq0w");
                    }
                }

                @Override
                public void onInitializationFailure(Provider arg0,
                        YouTubeInitializationResult arg1) {
                }

            });
}

}

I dont know why Android was returning errors when I was inflating views in normal way, but this works perfectly.

Answer 2

You can't use both a YouTubeBaseActivity and a SherlockActivity at the same time, at least not in a practical way.

Instead it's a lot easier if you just use a SherlockFragmentActivity to host a YouTubePlayerFragment

The YouTubePlayerFragment contains a YouTubePlayerView just like the YouTubeBaseActivity that would let you play YouTube videos.

If you need a tutorial about Fragments on Android you can start here