> Has anybody got any idea why this would be happening? Well... from http://brainflush.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/introducing-droid-fu-for-android-betteractivity-betterservice-and-betterasynctask/
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. Now, one could argue: well, just do all the work again, like, re-send the request or whatever job was running. Yes, you could do that. But that’s wasteful and, really, makes you feel stupid, no? Plus, if the user triggers a web service request, then flips the screen, decides that this wasn’t helpful, and flips it back, then your request is being sent 3 times in parallel. Is that what you want? Probably not. BetterAsyncTask to the Rescue Thanks to Droid-Fu, there’s a solution to this: BetterAsyncTask! (I’m a lazy person, and I couldn’t come up with a better name). It behaves exactly like AsyncTask (in fact, it is an AsyncTask), but it does some extra work for you: first and foremost, it keeps track of the active instance of the context that launched it, and if that instance should change, it will post the data back to the new instance. In other words, you can dispatch your task, flip the screen back and forth mentally, and BetterAsyncTask will still post the task’s result back to whatever activity instance is alive at the time it finishes. In other words, the task is only ever run once, regardless whether the context in which it was launched died while it was running or not. http://github.com/kaeppler/droid-fu -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
