Present data to user as Activity or Dialog

Question

Most of the time, I came across a situation, to choose whether I should present this list of data to user as Activity, or Dialog. I was wondering, is there any basic UI design guideline I should follow? I search through web, I do not see much discussion on this.

Answer 1

If the data presentation is just natural/straight path of work-flow, it should be presented in activity. While if your UI is to ask for conformation, warn / inform user about something specific or unusual (data loss warning / confirm for delete file etc) then dialogs can be used.

Also keep in mind that Activity also has back-stack, so by pressing back, user can come back to previous activity. While dialogs are not meant to be come back by pressing back.

Answer 2

Without knowing your use case, I'd recommend not to use dialogs, as you simply have more screen space on an normal Activity. For presenting Lists of data, the ListActivity or the ListView are a good starting point.

For general information on UI Patterns and best practices concerning android, google provides a lot of information here:

http://developer.android.com/design/index.html