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Correct way to close DialogFragment when using Navigation component?

I am using the Navigation component to show a DialogFragment (<dialog...>...</dialog> in the navigation.xml) and want to know what's the recommended way to close the Dialog. I tried myself and got the following results:
1) dismiss()in DialogFragment: seems to work fine
2) findNavController().navigateUp(): seems to work fine
3) findNavController().navigate(MyDialogFragmentDirections.actionMyDialogFragmentToMyNormalFragment()): works, but loads a fresh version of the target destination, so depending on the use case this might not be what one wants to have.
Note: My use case is that MyNormalFragmentuses MyDialogFragmentto get some input, so after MyDialogFragmentis shown, I need to get back to the already existing instance of MyNormalFragment.
So for me, only 1) or 2) is correct. Now I am wondering, is there any difference between 1) and 2) ?

Both 1) and 2) end up doing the same thing the end, but 2) is always a safer option.
When you call dismiss(), the DialogFragment is dismissed and the DialogFragment is stopped (it receives a callback to onStop()). This triggers the listener in DialogFragmentNavigator, which then updates the NavController's state by calling popBackStack().
dismiss() however, is an asynchronous operation (as seen in the DialogFragment source code - you'll note it does not use commitNow(), etc). Therefore if you were to check what destination you are on from the NavController.getCurrentDestination(), you'd see that you're still on the dialog destination, despite having triggered the dismissal.
navigateUp(), on the other hand, goes directly to the NavController. Since you have another destination on your back stack (the one under the DialogFragment), the NavController source code shows that navigateUp() just calls popBackStack() - the same operation that dismiss() was eventually triggering.
However, when it is the NavController that is driving the operation, NavController updates its state synchronously. This means that immediately after you call navigateUp(), it will have updated its getCurrentDestination() and internal state in addition to calling through to DialogFragmentNavigator's popBackStack(), which is what calls through to dismiss() (removing the observer mentioned above to prevent double dismissals).
Therefore calling navigateUp() is always the safer choice since it ensures that the NavController is synchronously updated to the correct state, rather than rely on FragmentManager's asynchronous timing (which may mean that additional click events are received during that time period due to multi-touch, etc.).
Calling navigate() with an action that has an app:destination on it will navigate to a new instance of the destination, which would not be appropriate for returning back to your previous instance.

Why is there no Android API for getting the current Activity?

The question, How can I get the current Activity? has been asked dozens of times on Stackoverflow and other sites and there are many proposed approaches. However, all of them have drawbacks in one form or another.
In this posting, I am assuming that there is no solution provided for this in Android's APIs, e.g., something like: Application.getTask().getRootActivity().
Wouldn't it be nice if there was :-)?
So, to be clear, I'm not asking for an answer to How can I get the current Activity?
Instead, I am asking for the reason that such a capability has not been provided. Given that each running app has a task (assuming that the task hasn't been emptied) and each such task has a root Activity, it would seem to be easy to provide access to that root Activity.
The fact that that such access is not provided, when it is so clearly desired, implies to me that there is something fundamental about the Android architecture that I don't understand.
What is it that I'm missing? Why is this information not provided by the Android APIs?
For background, here is a section summarizing some of the approaches that have been proposed. I found the following two links particularly informative (each of the approaches below is presented at one or both of the links).
Links
How to get current foreground activity context in android?
Android: How can I get the current foreground activity (from a service)?
Approaches
Static Hook
Reflection
ActivityManager
Other (Instrumentation, AccessibilityService, UsageStatsManager)`
ActivityManager
The ActivityManager approach only provides the name of the Activity class, not the current Activity instance. E.g., for a Context instance c:
c.getSystemService().getActivityManager()
.getAppTasks().get(0).getTaskInfo()
.topActivity().getClassName()
Reflection
My favorite is reflection, as proposed by _AZ, but that approach is fragile, given that it relies on internals. What I would like to see from Android is this approach provided via a standard API that developers could then safely rely on.
Static Hook
The most common approach is using a static hook to save a reference to the currently running Activity. The hook can be either per-Activity or per-Application. Memory leaks can be avoided by saving/destroying the hook's value (e.g., in onCreate()/onDestroy(), onStart()/onStop(), onPause()/onResume()). However, issues can arise when multiple Activities are involved (e.g., due to overlapping lifecycles -- see below).
I implemented a static hook approach which does the following (to be perfectly transparent, I haven't implemented #1 yet -- I am currently using a per-Activity static hook, which is a bug).
Provides a class that extends Application to provide the hook. The hook contains a Stack; each node in the stack is a simple ActivityInfo class which contains a reference to an Activity instance as well as the state of that instance (CREATED, STARTED, RESUMED).
Provides a class called ActivityTracker that extends Activity. I then extend each of my Activities with ActivityTracker. ActivityTracker uses its lifecycle callbacks to push/pop itself to/from the stack and to update its state -- my other Activities don't have to do anything.
In theory, this would allow me to always know the full state of the task's back stack -- the full set of Activities, including the root Activity, as well as their current state. In practice, however, there is a twist -- when one Activity starts another Activity, their lifecycles overlap. During that period, peeking at the stop of the stack can yield an unexpected Activity instance.
From: https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle.html#soafa, "Coordinating activities":
Here's the order of operations that occur when Activity A starts
Acivity B:
Activity A's onPause() method executes.
Activity B's onCreate(), onStart(), and onResume() methods execute in sequence. (Activity B now has user focus.)
Then, if Activity A is no longer visible on screen, its onStop() method executes
Of course, this could be managed also. The bottom line is that we do have a global context available for storing information (the Application) and we do have full information about Activity lifecycle transitions, so with enough effort I believe that this static stack-based approach could probably be made pretty bullet-proof.
But in the End
But in the end it feels like I am simply rewriting code which probably already exists internally for managing an Activity back stack, which is why I ask (in case you've forgotten):
Why is there no Android API for getting the current Activity?
UPDATE
In this update, I'll summarize what I've learned from this thread and my own experiments and research. Hopefully, this summary will be useful to others.
Definitions
I'm going to use the following definitions for "Activity Visibility States", based on the Activity State definitions at https://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities/activity-lifecycle.html.
-----------------------------------
Visibility State Definition
-----------------------------------
Not Visible Created+Stopped
Partially Visible Started+Paused
Fully Visible Resumed
-----------------------------------
Issues
The very definition of "Current Activity" is murky. When I use it, I mean the single Activity in the Fully Visible state. At any given instant, there may or may not be such an Activity. In particular, when Activity A starts Activity B, A's onPause() gets called and then B's onCreate(), onStart() and onResume(), followed by A's onStop(). There is a stretch between A's onPause() and B's onResume() where neither is in the Fully Visible state, so there is no Current Activity (as I define it). Of course, there are also situations where a background thread may want to access a Current Activity and there may or may not be an Activity at all, much less a Current Activity.
I've also realized that I may not always need a Current ("Fully Visible") Activity. In many cases, I may simply need a reference to an existing Activity, whether or not it is currently visible. In addition, that reference might be to just any Activity (for situations where I need to pass a generic Activity reference to some API method) or it might be to a specific Activity subclass instance (so that I can trigger some code specific to that Activity subclass).
Finally, there is the need to understand when Activity lifecycle callbacks are called by the main UI looper and how events like configuration changes are handled. For example, if I create a DialogFragment using an Activity intance which is currently in the "Not Visible" state, will it ever get displayed and, if so, when? Along similar lines, it turns out that the onDestroy() and onCreate() methods caused by a configuration change are contained in the same message in the UI's message queue (see Android UI Thread Message Queue dispatch order), so no other messages will be processed between those two callbacks (during a configuration change). Understanding this level of processing seems to be critical, but documentation on it is sorely lacking, if not missing completely.
Approaches
Here is a collection of approaches that can be used to address most of the above situations.
Background
For discussion, assume Activity A and Activity B, where A creates B.
Generally speaking, a "global" variable can be created by making it
"public static" on pretty much any class. Conceptually, extending
the Application class and adding it to the extended class would be
good, but if that's too much work it could be included (for
instance) in one of the Activity classes.
Generic Activity Reference
Useful whenever a generic Activity is needed.
Create a global variable. In both A and B, have onCreate() set it to "this" and onDestroy() set it to null.
Topmost Activity Reference
Useful whenever you want to access the currently visible Activity.
Create a global variable. In both A and B, have onResume() set it to "this". This approach works fine unless all Activities exit, in which case you may need to create a separate flag to indicate that situation. (That flag could be the Generic Activity Reference implementation mentioned above.)
Specific Activity Reference
Useful whenever a handle to a specific Activity subclass instance is needed.
In both A and B: create a global variable in the Activity subclass itself. Have onCreate() set it to "this and onDestroy() set it to null.
Application Context
Useful whenever a Context spanning the lifecycle of the entire app is needed or when you don't care about using a specific Activity Context (e.g., to create a Toast from a background thread).
You can get this from Activity's getApplication() and store it on a static hook.
Handling Configuration Changes
There may be times when you want to stop/start a background thread only across an Activity "session", where I define "session" to include the series of Activity instances which may be created and destroyed due to configuration changes. In my particular case, I have a Bluetooth Chat Activity and an associated background thread to handle the network connection. I don't want to have the connection destroyed and created each time the user rotates the device, so I need to create it only when one doesn't exist and destroy it only if a configuration change isn't underway. The key here is understand when onDestroy() is called due to a configuration change. This can be done with or without fragments. As is often the case, I prefer the non-fragment approach since the fragment approach doesn't seem worth the extra complexity to me.
Approach 1: Without Fragments
In onCreate(), create the background thread if it doesn't exist yet. In onDestroy(), destroy the background thread only if isFinally() returns false.
Approach 2: With Fragments
This works well because the FragmentManager will store fragment instances across configuration changes if setRetainInstance(true) is used. For an excellent example of this, see http://www.androiddesignpatterns.com/2013/04/retaining-objects-across-config-changes.html. The example is for AsyncTasks, but can also be applied to managing a background thread (just create the thread instead of an AsyncTask in the fragment's onCreate() and then destroy the thread in the fragment's onDestroy()).
Closing
Fully understanding these issues requires a deep understanding of how the UI looper processes its message queue -- when Activity callbacks are called, how other messages are interleaved with them, when display updates occur, etc. For instance, if a DialogFragment is created using an instance of a non-visible Activity, will it get displayed at all and, if so, when?
Perhaps some day Android will provide a deeper API to Tasks and their associated backstacks, along with documentation describing the UI's message processing and associated mechanisms in more detail. Until then, more "source code and/or ... empirical analysis" :-).
Thanks,
Barry

If all you want you want to know is which Activity is foremost and accepting user interactions, just create a BaseActivity that extends Activity and override onResume() and save a reference to "this" in a static variable. All of your other activities should extend BaseActivity. You're done.

The short answer I would guess is that only one activity can ever be active at a time in a given app, and that activity obviously knows who it is (it is itself) -- so the only answer any activity can get to "what activity is currently active" can only ever be "you are, silly".
For simple apps with a clear division between the different activity classes, this works fine, and so that's a great percentage of most of the apps in the play store. It doesn't work so hot when you're getting real clever with encapsulation and polymorphism, as I'm sure you've discovered, but I don't think Google is really targeting those types of developers.
Just my $0.02, I don't think you'll get an "official" answer here.

How to correctly manage ASynkTaks in Tabs which have the same fragment class

I have a FragmentActivity with 7 tabs, and all of them refers to the same fragment, the only difference is a parameter, that makes them to load throught an ASyncTask the data to show from a PHP that returns a JSON. My problem is that when I swipe from one tab to another, if the task from the first tab is still loading, it loads in the new tab, or crash, or doesnt do anything. However, the activity load two tabs, so the task is launched twice and is the same problem. Any idea?

While AsyncTasks are wonderful to have, they are intended to be procedures that are independent of any UI (e.g. saving information). For the longest time I was in the same boat and used AsyncTasks for work that would end up changing the UI (since hey, they have an onPost method).
What you should be using for any work that will affect the UI is called a Loader which will pay attention to the UI state of the Fragment. In your case the AsyncTask is probably attempting to access a UI element that no longer exists (View Pagers only keep the previous, current, and next views in memory). The Loader will pay attention to this and not attempt to change the UI.
There are plenty of examples out on the web, but in short you will need to create (extend) a Loader for each of your AsyncTasks (I recommend AsyncTaskLoader, if you do pay attention to forceLoad) and add the callbacks (LoaderManager.LoaderCallbacks) to your Fragment. Then when you are ready to load call getLoaderManager().restartLoader(LOADER_ID, bundle_args, loader_callback);

Keep a reference of your AsyncTask. I assume you have a callback which let's you know when the tabs have changed. When you get notified that tabs have changed you can check if your AsyncTask is null or not finished yet, if it isn't you call it's cancel() method.
if(asyncTask!=null && asyncTask.getStatus()!=AsyncTask.Status.FINISHED) {
asyncTask.cancel(false);
asyncTask = null;
}

How to cancel or dismiss a custom dialog in its onCreate method?

I have created a custom dialog called MyCustomDialog which extends Dialog. I create and show my custom dialog as follows:
new MyCustomDialog(myContext).show();
I override the Dialog.onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) method to do my initialisation. I also check in this method whether a certain condition holds and, if not, I would like to dismiss/cancel my dialog. I have tried calling the cancel() and dismiss() methods in my dialog's onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) and onStart() methods but it has no effect.
Anyone know how to cancel or dismiss a dialog (from within the dialog) before it shows?

You should place the logic to determine if the dialog is to be shown outside of the onCreate() method. it does not belong there.
Alternatively, rename your show() method showIfRequired() (or something), and add the conditional show logic there.
I know this doesn't technically answer your question, but what you are trying to do is not the correct design. That's a good thing, as doing in the right way is actually simpler.
Also, as a side note, you should using DialogFragment in favor of Dialog. it's available in the v4 support library.

This is for API levels 10 and below:
First you should override onCreateDialog(int id, Bundle args) in the Activity class, is that what you're doing? Dialogs are always created and displayed as part of the Activity. Second, I don't think you can cancel/dismiss a dialog in onCreateDialog because it hasn't actually been created when onCreateDialog is called. That is, you can't cancel/dismiss something that hasn't been created. What you can try is to override onPrepareDialog() instead and do your check to cancel/dismiss the dialog there. At that point the dialog should actually have been created (just not displayed), so you would be able to prevent it from getting displayed if you call cancel/dismiss there.
onPrepareDialog() is the proper place to do any sort of checks and decision making on the dialog that is about to be displayed. This is for APIs prior to Honeycomb.
This is for APIs 11 and later:
If you are using a later API, you should extend DialogFragment instead. In this case I think you can handle the decision making in onCreateView() method of DialogFragment which is similar to onPrepareDialog().
I hope you've read through this:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/dialogs.html
or this, depending on your API:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/DialogFragment.html
Overall, perhaps a cleaner solution is to disable the button or mechanism that causes the dialog to show up in the first place? That is, write you code such that Dialog.show() is called only when it really needs to be called. I'd have to know more details about what exactly you're trying to do. For example, say you call Dialog.show() from the onClickListener of a button. you don't really want the user to press a button, expect a dialog, but have it not show up due to some reason the user doesn't understand. A better solution would be to disable the button all together so that it's obvious to the user that this function isn't available due to something else in the application.

Loading Dialog while rotating device

I have an activity with in which there is a async task that will do some download stuff. AT the time of downlaoding it will show a loading dialog.
My problem is, it worked fine for me when me doing it in only one orentiaon. But when i rotate at the time of download, it shows window leaked and will crash at the
dialog.cancel in my post excute.
From my study on it more i understood it due the change in the context when device is rotated.
That is when a device is rotated the activity will be recreated so the context will be changed.
But i have created the dialog with old one and that wasn't the current context. So when i cancel it it shows error
What is the solution for this, any idea frnds.
Me using honeycomb, me tried but with fragment but didnt get a good sample for that. Me now mainly trying that,
if anyone can give me some links for that it will be
great

First of all: open your dialog using the showDialog method (there are a lot of examples in the official documentation). If you do so, the activity will take care of dismissing the dialog on destroy, and re-showing it after the activity has been recreated.
Also... if the dialog shows a progress bar (not a wheel), you will want to update the progress of the dialog after orientation changes. In order to do so, I recommend to use the onRetainNonConfigurationInstance to return the current state of the dialog and/or the activity itself. Then, you can use getLastNonConfigurationInstance to recover that state. Google about those two methods if you want to see examples.
Another thing to keep in mind: if you are updating the state of the dialog an/or any other UI element from the AsyncTask, you must be aware that after the activity is recreated, the AsyncTask may be pointing to the wrong UI references. In order to handle this, you can create a proxy class (Proxy design pattern) to detach the AsyncTask progress notifications from the current UI elements.