In my app, activity A connects to server database retaining Latitude and Longitude from different cities and activity B connects to google maps directions calculating distances between cities. The results are shown via List adapter.
Because there are a couple of distances to be calculate every time (20 -30), which is the fastest way to achieve this; Using many times AsyncTask or using threads;
Should i merge these two activities to speed up work; ( But then, i am facing problems because FragmentActivity, the extending class of activity B doesn't support List adapter
Thanks
1) Multithreading
I personally like AsyncTasks because they are a clean way to handle multithreading. (Note that AsyncTasks are running on separate threads in the doInBackground() part)
However, if you think the workload is too intensive for the AsyncTask than the android developer guide recommends you use a background Service instead.
To me it seems like you might be able to a sequence of two asynctasks: the first grabs the lat/long values from the server in doInBackground(). In the first's onPostExecute() you can start the second, giving it the server values. The second can then calculate the distance in its doInBackground() method.
2) Activities and ListAdapter
Combine both activities into one for sure. Even though FragmentActivity obviously can't be a ListActivity, you can still pull out your ListView from xml with
ListView list = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list);
Or programmatically create a list view with
ListView list = new ListView(this);
Then you can instantiate whatever type of adapter class you want and set it to the ListView. The following example show this using a CursorAdapter but this will work with any adapter, custom or built in.
CursorAdapter dataAdapter = new SimpleCursorAdapter(
getActivity(), R.layout.list_spot,
cursor,
columns,
to,
0);
list.setAdapter(dataAdapter);
Hope this helps!
Related
To update a Listview we can do following two things:
1) Create a new ArrayAdapter and bind it to ListView everytime the data is updated.
this.listView.setAdapter(new ArrayAdapter(getActivity(), data));
or
2) Update the contents of ArrayAdapter which is already binded to listview:
this.arrayadapter.clear();
for (Data item : data)
this.arrayadapter.add(item);
this.arrayadapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
So which method is more expensive?
The way you are doing it, the second one is definitely more expensive. ArrayAdapter calls notifyDataSetChanged() internally in clear() as well as in add(). You could change it to
this.arrayadapter.setNotifyOnChange(false);
this.arrayadapter.clear();
for (Data item : data)
this.arrayadapter.add(item);
this.arrayadapter.setNotifyOnChange(true);
this.arrayadapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
But even if you it this way, both calls contain a synchronized block which makes them slow. So even though you are creating a new ArrayAdapter in the first method, I would say it is faster.
You could further optimize it by using a custom adapter with a setItems(data) method that just replaces the internal data list.
I'd becareful with the accepted answers final conclusion. While SimonSays makes valid points about the iteration and adding...there's a lot that happens with setting a new adapter he fails to recognize. Which makes it hard to say if it's actually any better then the suggested for...each approach.
Setting a new adapter will cause the ListView to flush out all it's recycled view's. It'll also have to re-measure all the new views coming in...which leads to the getView() being called 3-4 times per item for several of the positions...if not all positions. (Varies with platform). So even though there's a sync block on adding, you'll probably see the getView method invoked far less times with possibility of using recycled views.
Basically, knowing which is better is hard and depends greatly on use case. I'd vote to stick with the for...each approach simply for better readability.
I am new to Android and am trying to get my header round the SimpleCursorAdapter and CursorLoader classes. From my understanding, all of the examples that I have seen use these two classes to load data into a ListView in a background thread (to not block the UI).
I am OK with this and have used this general approach with my own list of items, however I now want to be able to click on an item in the list and get the full information for the item. Is it usual practice to use SimpleCursorAdapter and CursorLoader to retrieve the details for a single item? or are they just meant for lists?.
Thanks.
They are not meant for lists only. You can - and should - use them in detail views (activities) as well.
I've sketched a possible way to do so on my blog:
http://www.grokkingandroid.com/using-loaders-in-android/
Think of Adapters as a layer of abstraction between your data (Cursor) and whatever you attach that Adapter to (ListView for example). This way, you have a common interface between your data (Cursor, ArrayList, whatever) and the View you display that data on (ListView, TableView, etc.), this is helpful because if you later find that you want to access your data through an ArrayList rather than a Cursor, then you simply swap out the adapter with a different one and you're ready.
Now considering your question, Adapters give an abstract access to information, therefore you can "ask" it for what information is stored and where. You could attach an OnItemClickListener to your ListView and then access your data from there.
In my application I am fetching the data from a web service in XML format, and parsing it and showing the data in listview. The problem is that if the web service contains 5000 objects then it takes a lot of time to display the data.
Can it be possible to show some data in listview and fetch the data at the same time at the end of the list.
Please provide me some sample code.
If you use convertView in your ListAdapter´s getView method it should not matter how many items you have in the list since the Views are beeing reused.
If your Listadapter takes an array of som sort you could add items to the array continuosly and call
mListAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
every time new data is added to the list.
By Using AsyncTask you can do this easily as each object is being fetched can be shown in listview using publishProgress() method while also updating user about what percentage of data hasbeen loaded.
Update:
By the way according to your situation the tool below which is developed by commonsware https://stackoverflow.com/users/115145/commonsware will suits you best...
https://github.com/commonsguy/cwac-endless
cwac-endless: Provides the EndlessAdapter, a wrapper for an existing ListAdapter that adds "endless list" capability. When the user scrolls to the bottom of the list, if there is more data for this list to be retrieved, your code gets invoked in a background thread to fetch the new rows, which then get seamlessly attached to the bottom of the list.
Currently, I'm using AsyncTask to handle Http connection and retrieve data as JSON format.
Loading all data is trivial but it consumes too much time, so I decided to switch to load 10 items at a time using LIMIT OFFSET (mysql).
Next I set up the event onScroll for my list view to create a new AsyncTask each time user scroll. However, from what I read, AsyncTask is stored in a thread pool which is limited 5 threads at a time, so I'm not sure this is a right approach. I'm newbie to client/server app, so could I anyone give me an advice on this issue? Any related article, documentation would be greatly appreciated.
Here are few useful links for it,
Android: Implementing progressbar and "loading..." for Endless List like Android Market
Endless Listview with current Async Task
Android Endless List
http://www.androidguys.com/2009/10/21/tutorial-autogrowing-listview/
http://mylifewithandroid.blogspot.com/2010/03/progressively-loading-listviews.html
In simple steps,
As user scrolls – detect the end of the list 1)Display a progress
notification 2)Ask for update 3)Receive update (asynchronously) and
extend list
A typical approach would be e.g. to load 25 initially and then have a footer in the list that displays e.g. the current count and the total count and upon pressing loads another 25 and so on. That would be a paged sort of loading.
When you do that you have to keep the current position and notify the adapter that the list has changed.
If you are using a ListView, I believe I can safely assume that you must be using some sort of ListAdapter. Instead of starting a new AsyncTask in the onScroll event, you should maintain just one single AsyncTask to retrieve data from the server, add that data to the ListAdapter dataset and then call notifyDatasetChanged on the ListAdapter.
The ListAdapter and ListView will take care of the rest.
I am new to android programming, but I am trying to learn. I have written some code that takes in some parameters through a "normal" view with checkboxes and textviews. Then I use this information to generate a lot of numbers that I want to display in a listview. I have managed to create a listview when I press a run button, but how do I pass the information from the main view to the listview. Is it best to pass the information one number at the time or a large array with all the numbers. The list of numbers can be really large.
What you probably what to do is create an adapter with the numbers as the data source. If the numbers are in an array you can create a new ArrayAdapter and set the ListView adapter as that adapter:
ArrayAdapter adapter = new ArrayAdapter<Double>(getApplicationContext(), R.id.id_of_textbox, arrayOfDoubles);
listView.setAdapter(adapter);
In this code I've assumed the numbers are doubles, however ArrayAdapter is a generic class so it can be any object contained in the array. The array can also be presented as a List (like an ArrayList).
Hope that helps you out. Here are some bit of documentation to read and some good video sessions to watch:
ArrayAdapter
ListView.setAdapter()
The World of ListView Google I/O 2010 Session
How big is the array can get?
Most likely that displaying the list as another activity and passing the data as intent's extra will be the solution.