Group items tagged

Droid-Fu offers both support classes meant to be used alongside existing Android code, as well as self-contained, ready-to-be-used components like new adapters and widgets. The areas tackled by Droid-Fu include: application life-cycle helpers support classes for handling Intents and diagnostics better support for background tasks super-easy and robust HTTP messaging powerful caching of Objects, HTTP responses, and remote images custom adapters and views I suggest you read this introductory article, and anything that follows.

So the basic idea is: launch an AsyncTask making your service call, show a nifty progress dialog while the task thread is running, and have the task’s result be posted back to your activity once it completes. Cool, but what if the user decides to rotate the screen while your task is running? Or a phone call comes in, interrupting your app, and Android decides to kill it? Both these actions will effectively terminateyour activity, and recreate it when resuming (yes, a screen rotation kills your activity, very clever, isn’t it?). Unfortunately, any AsyncTask that was still running now holds a stale reference to your activity, because the restarted activity will be an entirely different object in memory (and it will go through onCreate(), as if the activity had started for the first time). I’m not entirely sure whether AsyncTask will actually post back the data to the old activity object (if it was a weak reference, it may already have been garbage collected), but in any case, your “new” activity will never see it, because it’s a different instance.