I am new to android development.
So I have a question about activities.
On Google developer, they say you have to make a class which is inheriting from the class Activity.
So far so good. Now I am thinking an Activity is a class, which leads to my major problem.
So when activity is a class how can it invoke all the live cycle methods.
In Java, I learnt there must be an object of a class to invoke methods and actions. So when activity is not an object but a class, how is this possible.
Kindest regards
Jan
When a user starts your app the android operating system will instantiate an object based on your class which must be a subclass of Activity.
The operating system will use that object and call the lifecycle hooks (e.g. onCreate, onResume, ...) which you implented in your activity subclass when one of the related lifecycle events happens.
Here it is clearly mentioned under CREATING AN ACTIVITY header, that system calls the callback methods, based on which event has occurred. Suppose user is interacting with your activity, then using the object created by the OS for that activity, all the callback methods will be executed. Please refer.
Related
I am having an architectural problem with an Android project. I have the main activity(A) where a lot of stuff is initialized then I have 1 Activity(B) that handles some broadcasts from the system, this activity needs to access the stuff initialized by the main activity. If the app is killed and the activity (B) is called the onCreate of the Activity (A) is not called so the stuff is not initialized, how can I handle this situation properly?
That's a sign of not properly encapsulating the logic.
I don't know what your app is about, so that makes it difficult to generalize, but probably your Activity A has a lot of objects and variables related to you model, what you should do is isolate all this logic of your model in a single component, that you can initialize with a single call (or a few lines) either from activity A or B.
This logic can include opening files or sharedPreference, initializing objects, downloading data... Ideally all the logic is isolated from the user interface. The User Interface, on the other hand should be only responsible to present the data in a human readable (and hopefully enjoyable) way.
When first time your activity B is called, pass all initialization values to it from Activity A and save the in Activity B.
If app is killed and activity B is called, it have all the initialized values.
You should develop App using MVC arthitucture
Check this MVC Pattern in Android Development
This will help you batter.
I am new to Android development. After learning from many tutorials I got many Activities and many Fragments. How can I make a core engine to check what Activity is running and what Fragment is showing on a container?
Assume that I have:
Acivity01, Activity02, ... , Activity10
Fragment01, Fragment02, ... , Fragment10
I want to make a class that filters the Activity where Activity is on runtime and what Fragment is embeded to that activity.
How can I do this?
If I understand you correctly, you may want to store some references within your Application class to an Activity and to Fragment instance(-s), which are currently in foreground (by this I mean that user can instantly interact with Activity/Fragment).
As for Activity
Create some Activity field in your Application class and getter/setter methods for it (e.g., setCurrentActivity(), getCurrentActivity()). Then call setCurrentActivity() from onResume() method for each of your Activity instances. Don't forget to call setCurrentActivity, supplying null reference to ir in order to properly handle a case, when there are no foreground activities, but application is stll working.
As for Fragment
The general idea is similar to the first item, but there can be more than one Fragment instance in foreground state at time. So you need to store something like List, where you add your resumed fragments and remove paused.
You may also want to implement something similar for dialogs, for example. Then use the same strategy. Hope it will help.
My Activity is injected with a number of objects that are initialized
before onCreate is called for the first time.
When my Activity finishes by invoking the finish method, it passes
through onDestroy before returning to the main "OS desktop" window.
I then invoke my application again, and onCreate is again called.
This time though my view remains the same as when finish was initially
called above.
Therefore, I am wondering if RoboGuice re-instantiates the injected
objects again? If not, is there a way for me to do this?
Thanks.
are you saying that these are not re-instantiated then?
when onCreate() is called ex. when you change phone orientation every object are injected once again. But if one of injected object is Singleton, the same instance of object will be injected. "Singleton" works in scope of whole application so the activity lifecycle does not ifluence on signleton objects.
Take a look at the Android activity lifecycle docs.
If onCreate is called by Android then a new instance of your activity was created and any non-singleton components will be instantiated, and all components will be injected by roboguice.
If you only need a single instance of a component you can make it a singleton. Just be cautious of memory use with singletons because they will live for the duration of the application process. So even if an activity has been destroyed but your app process is still running those singletons will be consuming memory.
Roboguice is just a wrapper around guice. If you are interested in pursuing other options for getting instances of classes take a look at Bindings, Scopes and Providers in guice.
My launch activity starts up another activity whose launch is set to single instance. In this 2nd activity, I have a public method. I then start up a 3rd activity and that activity needs to access the public method in the 2nd activity. I don't want to use startActivity and pass it extras because I assume the onCreate will get called (or am I wrong?) and I need to avoid the 2nd activity from reinitializing itself.
When an activity is started using startActivity, is it possible to gain access to the underlying class instance itself and simply call the method?
I actually came up with a simple solution. As a matter of fact you can access the underlying class of an activity. First, you create a class that is used to hold a public static reference to activity 2. When activity 2 is created, in its onCreate method you store "this" in the static reference. Activity 2 implements an interface with the methods that you want available to any other activity or object. The static reference you hold would be of a data type of this interface. When another activity wants to call a method in this activity, it simply accesses the public static reference and calls the method. This is no hack but is intrinsic to how Java operates and is totally legitimate.
It is not a good idea.
As I can understand method from second activity is actually not connected to particular activity while you want to call it from another one. So carry the method out to other (non-activity) class (maybe static method) and use it from both activities.
It's not directly possible to gain access to activity object started using startActivity (without using some hacks). And frankly you shouldn't even trying to accomplish this.
One Activity component can cycle through several Activity java object while its alive. For example, when user rotates the screen, old object is discarded and new activity object is created. But this is still one Activity component.
From my experience, when you need to do things you described, there is something wrong with your architecture. You either should move part of activity's responsibilities to Service or to ContentProvider, or use Intents, etc. Its hard to recommend anything more specific without knowing more details.
No there is no way to pass a reference via startActivity() however you can use some sort of shared memory to keep reference to your Activity. This is probably a bad design. However passing an extra with your Intent will not cause onCreate, that is completely related to the lifecycle.
This is a pretty simple question, but I have been unable to find anyway to accomplish what I am trying to do...
I want to launch a new Activity to display some complex information. Because of the complexity, it is undesirable to serialize the information into the intent's parameters. Is it possible for the the new Activity to get a reference to the launching activity, so it can call its methods?
If you use a custom application class, you can store information that will be kept between the activities.
See a tutorial here for instance.
The lifetime of an Activity cannot be depended upon. In this case, one way of sharing data is to have a singleton which holds the data to be shared between the two activities.
You can add a public static field to the first activity containing this (the first activity).
But beware that the first activity could be destroyed by Android while you are using the second activity, so you will have to implement a fallback method if the first activity is destroyed.
And don’t forget to unset the public static variable in the onDestroy() callback of the first activity or you will leak memory.
Is it possible for the the new Activity to get a reference to the launching activity, so it can call its methods?
Please do not do that. Android can and will destroy activities to free up memory.
Complex information like you describe should not be owned by an activity. It should be held in a central data model, like you would in any other application. Whether that central data model is mediated by a Service or a singleton or a custom Application object depends a bit on the type of data, caching models, risks of memory leaks, and so on.
You can make your complex objects public and static in ActivityA, and access them in ActivityB like this:
MyCustomObjectType complexFromA = ActivityA.complexObject;
this will work, however while in ActivityB, you can't always be sure that static objects from ActivityA will exist(they may be null) since Android may terminate your application.
so then maybe add some null checking:
if(null == ActivityA.complexObject) {
//go back to ActivityA, or do something else since the object isn't there
}
else {
//business as usual, access the object
MyCustomObjectType complexFromA = ActivityA.complexObject;
}
You could also use a Singleton object which extends Application. You would have the same problem when Android terminates your application. always need to check if the object actually exists. Using the Singleton extending Application approach seems to be the more organized way - but adds more complexity to implementation. just depends what you need to do and whatever works for your implementation.
You should create a separate class that both the activities can use.
public class HelperClass{
public void sharedFunction(){
//implement function here
}
}
I would recommend staying away from static variable in android. It can cause some unexpected behavior.
Use getParent() from new activity and call parent's method
Android Activity call another Activity method