I'm stuck on a tough architectural problem. I have a collection of web services that produce data that will populate UI components - TextViews, ListViews, and so on. Each web service may take up to about 10 seconds to respond, or it might not respond at all. When I click a button in the UI that requires data from the web services I need to show a ProgressDialog until either the data arrives or it times out.
I'm pretty sure that an IntentService is the best way to wrap the web services. From the documents (http://developer.android.com/reference/ android/app/IntentService.html) "This "work queue processor" pattern is commonly used to offload tasks from an application's main thread." Also "Note that unlike other application components, calls on to the IBinder interface returned here may not happen on the main thread of the process." The UI needs to get data back (asynchronously) from the IntentService, which means using AIDL, onBind, and all that. But from the documents (http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/aidl.html) we have "By default, IPC calls are synchronous. If you know that an IPC service takes more than a few milliseconds to complete, you should not call it in the Activity/View thread, because it might hang the application (Android might display an "Application is Not Responding" dialog). Try to call them in a separate thread." Of course, that "separate thread" stuff in the AIDL docs in nonsense. If you spawn a separate thread in an Activity it will get blown up in OnDestroy. But what do they mean by "By defualt"? Are there cases where the IPC can be asynchronous? Is that what is meant by the text in the IntentService docs "may not happen on the main thread"? How does this work? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
