Android Question Need a few suggestions for new app development

[Indic Software]

Hello,

I have just finalized to develop an Android application. This app has many features that I have to develop but for the one feature that I want guidance from the community is....

The client has an existing database with contains a lot of religious books they have digitized (keyed in).

Currently these books are only managed and accessible through web. No public access is provided. Now they have decided to give access to this vast material to general public. For this they want to develop a mobile app.

In the mobile app they want the app to retrieve the content of the book from their MySQL server and show it in the app like an ebook in which users can change the fonts, turn pages, find words, highlight text, etc.

I searched the web but most of the solutions/libraries that I found for Android only support the epub format. But here in my case the content is not in epub format it comes from clients MySQL database server.

Anyone know if there are any libraries that support showing HTML content as ebook and give the features I have listed above?

Btw I found this very interesting epub reader libs. I don't know if any of these are supported by B4A or not:
https://skyepub.net/
http://www.siegmann.nl/epublib/android
https://github.com/FolioReader/FolioReader-Android
https://github.com/FolioReader/FolioReaderKit
https://github.com/julianharty/new-android-daisy-reader

There is one more link that is not directly related to ebook but related to ORM which I think would be useful to many a developers - http://ormlite.com/

Regards,

Yogesh

 

[Star-Dust]

Hello,

I have just finalized to develop an Android application. This app has many features that I have to develop but for the one feature that I want guidance from the community is....

The client has an existing database with contains a lot of religious books they have digitized (keyed in).

Currently these books are only managed and accessible through web. No public access is provided. Now they have decided to give access to this vast material to general public. For this they want to develop a mobile app.

In the mobile app they want the app to retrieve the content of the book from their MySQL server and show it in the app like an ebook in which users can change the fonts, turn pages, find words, highlight text, etc.

I searched the web but most of the solutions/libraries that I found for Android only support the epub format. But here in my case the content is not in epub format it comes from clients MySQL database server.

Anyone know if there are any libraries that support showing HTML content as ebook and give the features I have listed above?

Btw I found this very interesting epub reader libs. I don't know if any of these are supported by B4A or not:
https://skyepub.net/
http://www.siegmann.nl/epublib/android
https://github.com/FolioReader/FolioReader-Android
https://github.com/FolioReader/FolioReaderKit
https://github.com/julianharty/new-android-daisy-reader

There is one more link that is not directly related to ebook but related to ORM which I think would be useful to many a developers - http://ormlite.com/

Regards,

Yogesh

You probably do not know the EPUB format. Otherwise you would know it is nothing but a zippered HTML format. If you rename EPUB in ZIP open it with a decompression program see all pages in HTML format and an index inside the TOC file.
Depending on the version it may have different indexes in addition to the TOC format.
Folders ocn the images, links, indexes and also the number of pages that correspond to the paper (if there is a paper format)

Doing it with HTML pages is a walk .. I do not understand what your problem is, or what exactly do you ask

 

[DonManfred]

But here in my case the content is not in epub format it comes from clients MySQL database server.

Not in EPUB; so in WHAT format are the data then?

Again: It is not EPUB; why are you searching for ePUB readers then?

 

[Informatix]

There's already a B4A library for ePub. Just use the search field above.

 

[Star-Dust]

I made an EPUB reader. What I recommend, since the books are in EPUB format, if you want to get the solos, you can not handle them with WebView.

If you do not need to point to the contents, you can simply read it with WebView and add search, indexing, notes, etc. functions without any difficulty.

If you can transfer the database to SQLITE, so avoid connecting to the online server.

I hope the contents of the database are divided into books and chapters

 

[Indic Software]

You probably do not know the EPUB format. Otherwise you would know it is nothing but a zippered HTML format. If you rename EPUB in ZIP open it with a decompression program see all pages in HTML format and an index inside the TOC file.
Depending on the version it may have different indexes in addition to the TOC format.
Folders ocn the images, links, indexes and also the number of pages that correspond to the paper (if there is a paper format)

Doing it with HTML pages is a walk .. I do not understand what your problem is, or what exactly do you ask

The actual data is in HTML format. It resides on a remote server and I have to fetched it using web services.

I know EPUB is a zip file. But my data is not in EPUB format as stated above.

Again implementing features that I have noted in my first post would require a lot of coding and very deep knowledge of Android inner working. So reading HTML content is just showing it is not what I am looking at. I can easily do that. In fact I have done that in anther app already in past.

Regards,

Yogesh

 

[Indic Software]

Not in EPUB; so in WHAT format are the data then?

Again: It is not EPUB; why are you searching for ePUB readers then?

The data is in HTML format. I tried to find libs that that would allow me to display HTML as an eBook but I keeps on banging into EPUB format readers!

Do you know of any libs that would show HTML content from a remote web service in eBook format?

Regards,

Yogesh

 

[DonManfred]

Do you know of any libs that would show HTML content from a remote web service in eBook format?

No

 

[Star-Dust]

The actual data is in HTML format. It resides on a remote server and I have to fetched it using web services.

I know EPUB is a zip file. But my data is not in EPUB format as stated above.

Again implementing features that I have noted in my first post would require a lot of coding and very deep knowledge of Android inner working. So reading HTML content is just showing it is not what I am looking at. I can easily do that. In fact I have done that in anther app already in past.

Regards,

Yogesh

Sorry I did not say well. Epub is not just a ZIP file, but an HTML ZIP file.
An EPUB reader, in the first step, decompresses EPUB in many HTML files, and the second step reads HTML files and displays them as a book.
That is why an EPUB reader does an identical job to what you are looking for, the difference that does not have to unpack the EPUB file and bring it to HTML files.

When you access through the internet to the server where HTML pages and memos are contained, you can view them with WebView and
Modify fonts, transform pages, find words by simply injecting the HTML CODE before sending it to WebView.

Excuse me if I insist, but already a similar job I did 2 years ago. Absorb a HTML publication from a publishing site and view in ebook format by editing the layout, graphic appearance, and entering search functions.

I can tell you the only thing you can not highlight the text even though there is a B4A library that creates this effect. (See https://www.b4x.com/android/forum/threads/highlight-text-in-webview-with-long-tap.14437/)

However, there are no libraries that create the Ebook effect for HTML, you have to create it and it is not a difficult thing

 

[Star-Dust]

Obviously you have to download them with the OkHttp and OkHttpUtils libraries and get HTML content. Before you switch it over to WebView, you have to process them.

Then if you want to avoid WebView you have to transform them into RichText and display them in a slider label or in an EdiText with TypeInput set to None (With B4A 6.80+ there seems to be a new CSBuilder format for formatting and text)

 

[Indic Software]

Star Dust,

Thanks for your suggestions.

I will try them out shortly.

At the back of my mind I was hoping to find a ready to use Lib but anyways let us see what happens.

Regards,

Yogesh