As the Android platform has been maturing, developers found that the standard approach to organise the architecture and design of the application code wasn’t the best at all. Usually we ended up having a massive monolithic module, an Activity or a Fragment, containing business and UI logic, creating an unmaintainable and untestable messy project.

Google itself haven’t provided so far a good practice guideline or code examples showing a modular and decoupled approach that implements any of the well known and widely used design patterns, like for example MVC which is encouraged by default on the iOS platform or the common MVVM in Microsoft environments.

One of the most common pattern that the community of Android developers has been using for a while and that has got lot of attention is the Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern and we will focus on it on this post. We will not go through a deep academic description of the pattern but we will focus on the advantages and practical use of it. For an awesome analysis of the MVP and other patterns take a look at this classic post from Martin Fowler about GUI architecture.

So what’s MVP?

Basically MVP is an architectural design pattern that divides our application code in three entities in order to achieve a modular design, implementing the separation of concerns concept, allows an easier implementation of unit tests and making possible to reuse and replace modules either of our UI, data or business layer.

MVP is an evolution of MVC and it has multiple variants and implementations. There has been a lot of conversations and debate about the best and proper way to adopt it on Android. I’m going to expone my way which I have been using in a couple of projects and I reckon works better for me. Of course it doesn’t mean is the best or only one that works on Android, so please leave any comment and suggestions if you find any area of improvement.

Ok so let’s see who is who in this approach.

The View

This entity is going to include the visual part of our app, it is only the UI and it will not have any logic or knowledge of the data displayed. The View doesn’t know anything about the business logic or how to get the data it has to show to the user.

Activities, Fragments, Dialogs, etc… would be included in this category. This elements will contain only initialisation and display functionalities of the visual components and elements to display information to the user. It will not contain any functional or business logic like access to database or web server for example.

This module (Activity, Fragment, etc) exports an interface that will be used by the Presenter, which is responsible and have the knowledge and logic about how, when and what to show in the View. This interface will have methods like “showProgressBar”, “showLoginErrorMessage” or “launchSignupActivity”. Here is an example:

public interface WelcomeView { void launchHomeActivity(); void LaunchSignupActivity(); void closeActivity(); void setWrongUsernameError(); void setWrongPasswordError(); void showLoginErrorAlertDialog(); }

The Presenter

As we mentioned before, this entity is going to have all the logic and knowledge about what, how and when to display in the user interface. It will be responsible of capture events raised by the user when interacting with the UI and perform any action.

The presenter also acts as a bridge between the View and the Model fetching any data needed from the data layer, making any transformation and display this info to the user on the View.

This entity ideally shouldn’t have any dependency of the Android SDK such us Context or Activity references.

The Activity will have a reference to the Presenter interface and it will use it to communicate any event occurred on the View, like the user tap on a button or the user enter any data in a TextView and then it will decide what to do in reaction of that event.

Here is an example of a Presenter interface:

public interface WelcomePresenter { void onCreateAccountClick(); void onActivityResultCalled(int requestCode, int result); void onLoginClick(); }

So for example let’s say that if the user tap on a Logout button, the View call the exported method “onLogoutClick” of the Presenter interface. Then the it knows what interactor of the Model layer needs to invoke to perform a Logout action on the app.

Once the log out success callback has been received, the Presenter will perform any action on the View, for example closing the Activity and displaying a home screen Activity.

The Model

In this entity we will include the “interactors” (use cases of our business logic) that will perform and manage any business layer logic and data access, like fetching data from our web service, accessing the database, etc.

Once we have that piece of data the interactor will send it back to the Presenter and this will decide what to do with this data and how to show it to the View as we saw in the previous point.

Here an example of an implementation of an interactor:

public class WelcomeInteractorImpl implements WelcomeInteractor { private WelcomeInteractorListener mListener; public WelcomeInteractorImpl(WelcomeInteractorListener listener) { this.mListener = listener; } @Override public void loginWithUserName(String username, String password) { ParseUser.logInInBackground(username, password, new LogInCallback() { public void done(ParseUser user, ParseException e) { if (mListener != null) { if (user != null) { mListener.onLoginSuccessful(); } else { mListener.onLoginError(e); } } } }); } }

Summary

So this is a very brief summary of what is MVP and how to use it on Android to achieve a cleaner, modular and testable source code. This is just an interpretation of the pattern and is not a silver bullet or the perfect solution for our apps, so any comments or critics are more than welcome!

To see an example of this implementation you can take a look to one of my open source experimental apps “Treepolis”. Is still an in progress project and you can find it here in Github

To see a practical example of the pattern used for the Welcome screen and login functionality check this folder.