Appendix A: CWAC Libraries

CommonsWare — the publisher of this book — has also published a series of open source libraries, collectively named the CommonsWare Android Components (CWAC). If you have read through the book, you will have seen many of these libraries.

This appendix lists all of the CWAC libraries. If the library is covered elsewhere in the book, the appendix links you to that coverage. Those that are not covered elsewhere will be described in this appendix, to accompany the online documentation found at the library’s GitHub repository.

cwac-document

The cwac-document repository holds a fork of DocumentFile that:

• Supports non-document Uri values
• Supports Uri values on older devices
• Offers convenience methods for working with the content (e.g., copyTo(), copyFrom(), openInputStream(), openOutputStream())

cwac-layouts

The cwac-layouts repository contains a series of custom containers and related views.

The current contents of this library — AspectLockedFrameLayout, MirroringFrameLayout, and kin — are covered in the chapter on custom views.

cwac-netsecurity

The cwac-netsecurity repository contains a backport of Android 7.0’s network security configuration subsystem, to make it easier for you to work with SSL-enabled Web sites. This is covered in greater detail in the chapter on SSL.

cwac-presentation

The cwac-presentation repository contains code in support of the Presentation system, for sending alternative content to an external display, independent of the device’s primary screen.

All of the classes in this repository are covered in the chapter on the Presentation system.

cwac-provider

The cwac-provider repository contains StreamProvider, a riff on Google’s FileProvider, offering a “canned” implementation of a ContentProvider that can serve files from a variety of sources, such as assets and raw resources from your project.

This is discussed briefly in the chapter on ContentProvider implementations.

cwac-saferoom

The cwac-saferoom repository contains code that bridges the gap between SQLCipher for Android and the Room database layer from the Architecture Components. This library is covered in depth in “Android’s Architecture Components”.

cwac-security

The cwac-security repository contains code to help app developers help their users defend against attacks. At the moment, this contains the PermissionUtils class, used to help determine if a custom permission was defined by another app before yours was installed. This is discussed in the chapter on advanced permission techniques.