I am new to android development and I see that there are different components (activities, services, etc.) where each component has a different life cycle.
I am encountering a situation where I have an object that should be accessed by different components. Namely, I have a list of objects that changes dynamically, and that list should be accessed by:
An activity that displays the list in a ListView
A broadcast receiver, that responds to alarm events scheduled in the AlarmManager.
The broadcast receiver may kick in hours after the activity was used. At this time, the activity may or may not be still alive in memory.
Is there anywhere I can put the list so it will be accessible to all app parts? My idea was to serialize the objects I need to share, write them to shared preferences and then recreate them whenever needed. I'm not sure it's a good idea, and even if it is - how would I design it? when would writing to shared preferences (or somewhere else) occur? when would reading occur (it would be preferable to read the object from memory when possible)?
You can put it in SharedPreferences if it a compatible data type, or serialize the list to a file in the internal or external storage (see saving files, you probably want internal storage for your situation).
You can read the list in the onResume() method of the Activity or the onReceive() method of the receiver. Writing will occur whenever a new element needs to be added to the list, you will deserialize the list, add the element and re-serialize it. You may need to place the reading and writing in a synchronized block or method to prevent simultaneous access.
If the list may be added to outside of the Activity when the Activity is resumed you may need to provide a broadcast receiver or other mechanism for the Activity to be alterted and reload the list.
As Gabe pointed out, you could store it in a static variable somewhere, but the way you described the situation serializing sounds like a better option. Otherwise the list is gone if your process is terminated by the Android system.
As kcoppock pointed out, you could use an SQLite database to store the data, but this sounds like overkill from what you described. You will be in for some additional coding without much benefit.
What you are looking for is the Android Shared Preferences. You can access Sharepreferences using getApplicationContext() from an Activity or a Service.
Hope this helps
If you don't want it permanently stored, put it in a static variable somewhere (anywhere they both agree to- a separate class would be a good idea). Then you can access the list unless Android kicks the class out of memory- which it should only do it its terminating the app due to lack of memory, in which case it doesn't matter much anyway.
If you do want it permanently stored, the filesystem is the best way. You'll need to synchronize access to it of course.
Related
What's the best way to save any changes to global state, that would be lost if the process was killed due to low memory etc?
For activities we have onSaveInstanceState() which allows state to be saved when needed.
I would like something similar for global state. Our Application class holds a references to many objects that can be simply reloaded in onCreate() when the app next starts. But we also change the state of some of those objects, and require these changes to be maintained through the app being killed due to low memory etc.
We could of course persist every time changes are made to the objects in memory. But this would be very wasteful.
My current thought is to use onActivitySaveInstanceState() and keep a dirty flag to know only to call it once. But this adds complexity and probably isn't what this method was intended for.
This cannot be a particularly uncommon requirement, but most of the resources on the net focus on just Activity lifecycle. I'd be pleased to learn of a better approach.
There is no concept of Global State and I actually think that you don't need it at all. An app consists of several independent parts which have their own "state". Thus each part is responsible for its own state. For instance, a fragment which shows particular data knows where to get this data and what to do if there is no such data. An activity which shows user settings knows where to get user settings, how to update it and so on. Both of these parts know what to do when lifecycle methods are calling.
You can always store values in your Application class. On a high level, this is very simple, you create a custom MyCustomApplication, that extends the Android Application class. The Applicaiton class only lives, while the App is in scope (including when it's in the background, which is somewhat unpredictable in Android).
Then you would can access this using the getContext().getApplication()
The implementation details are more complex, and you really should extend the Applicaiton into a Singleton, as described in this SO post: Singletons vs. Application Context in Android?
I want to keep some objects in memory for operations in all the activities of my app and I also want to store those objects when the app closes. Which is the most efficient way of doing this ? Some possibilities that I can think of are:
1) Keeping local copies of objects in all the activities, serialize them and pass them through intent.
2) Keep local copies of objects in all the activities, serialize them and do file read and write on activity resume and pause respectively.
3) Make them static variables but I don't know when to do the file read/write operations in that case? This approach may leak memory.
4) Use Application object and define my objects as variables in that object. Since it has a definite life cycle like activity, I can do read/write accordingly.
I recommend your approach number 2. The reason is that there is no such thing as "the app closes". Android tries to keep it in memory until the memory is needed for other purposes. The process of your app is then simply killed, you don't get any callbacks called.
Singletons or the Application object can be used to cache the objects if you are careful to load and store them as necessary. However, this also means, that the memory used for them is only reclaimed if the app process terminates.
It depends on your data. All approaches are good in some cases.
I think you have 2 options:
keep data in sqlite. It is easier then files and faster. When activity starts request required data from db and show it. (use files if you really want)
create a singletone class to store data. Data will be loaded in memory and you can access it very fast. When data changes save it to sqlite or file. google "share data between activities"
Just wondering what is a better practice to pass information between activites, adding it to a bundle or using a singleton class to store and access this data. I have used both in the past for various android side projects, but I am now working on an android project that is of much larger scale, so would prefer to do things right towards the beginning.
My application authenticates users and then will have to do various queries based on it's id. To minimize coupling between activities, I would think just adding the id to the bundle, and then letting each activity query for the information that it needs, would be the best bet; however to increase responsiveness, I was leaning towards using a singleton class to store persistent information, preventing more queries than need be.
Personally, I would create an extension of Application to store the state of your app and share data between the different activities. The Application acts as the context for your whole app and Android guarantees there will always only be one instance across your app. Hence it works similar to defining your own Singleton, but using Application will allow Android to take control of the life cycle of your shared data and basically do the memory management for you.
Here are some more details. If you go down this path, you can simply add any getter/setter (or other) method to your application extension to store/retrieve data and do operations on it. Especially the latter can become quite a pain to manage (and keep consistent) when using Bundles passed back and forth between activities. If would only use a Bundle if the data is needed in just one or two places that are neighbours in the activity flow and does not need any (complex) operations to be run on it.
The better way to go for you is to use SharedPreferences to keep userId you need to keep and reuse. Of course you can use singleton approach or even Application class, but the data will be lost after application is killed.
The only time I pass data between Activities via bunlde is if it's something that I won't need to access for a while(i.e the the resID of a resource I want to use only once in the calling activity, etc). I would also think the difference in responsiveness would be very minimal, so that shouldn't be of concern. I suggest the singleton approach
Passing bundles is a tedious job. You'll have to pass a bundle for every change in activity to make sure that the value is not lost, even if you're not using the value in the called activity.
Singleton pattern have some bad results. For example:From Main activity you call secondary activity. Phone call interrupted your work.After ending phone call Android is trying to bring secondary activity to screen. Here is my nightmare - many users complaint about exceptions - Google reported to me NULL pointers in my singleton. So you have to provide not only singleton, but all data inside singleton have to be as singleton too. This maked come very complicated :(
Ddms tells that, when I recall my class called in the past, it performs an onCreate() instead of onResume() that I expected...
I noticed that values that I stored in variables of my class in this case are lost and are null.
I presume that Android decide to do so to free memory resources (isn't it?).
I know that I could use Sharedpreferences to store data in a persistent way and then retrieve... But this is a really dirty way, in my opinion.
So, my question: how to have variables' values preserved also after an onDestroy() (I think?) that Android decided automatically?
Android will terminate your process at any time when you have no visible activities. For example, the user might go into Settings and terminate your app.
Static data members (my interpretation of your "variables of my class" description) are only meant to be caches, at best. They are no substitute for a persistent data model, whether you use a database, an XML file, a JSON file, or whatever.
So, if you want "variables' values preserved", save them someplace persistent.
You might find this page on data storage helpful. If your data is primitive, SharedPreferences are the recommended route. (Why do you think they are dirty?) If you need to store an object, you can use internal storage, as documented on that page.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onSaveInstanceState(android.os.Bundle)
If you don't like SharedPreferences, then you might want to look into Content Providers Even though Content Providers share data across applications, they also provide functionality for you to store persistent data in SQLlite and files that are available only to your app. In this case data stored in this fashion will be available even after closing and restarting your app.
You can save dynamic state by passing name:value pairs or serializable objects using the Android Architecture and the methods onSaveInstanceState and onRetainNonConfigurationState. You can persist state as explained in the other answers by writing to prefs and doing database writes.
I've been using custom Application class to store data over application life line.
How to declare global variables in Android?
Is there any reason not to use the Application class to share variables across Activities?
For instance a handle to the DB or a single HttpClient.
According to the official documentation "you can use it to maintain global application state". IMO you wouldn't want to hold onto to too many heavy objects, globally. Ofcourse, "too many" is too fuzzy:) There are other ways of sharing (persistent) data: Preferences, database, files. You might want to check whether any of these are a better fit for your problem.
The other thing that you need to understand about when using Application object is its Life cycle. Unfortunately, discussion of that can be very subjective but fortunately, such as discussion has already been done
Good luck!
The Application object is meant for maintaining Application state rather than resources. Personally, I would initiate DB connections or HTTP clients in each Activity that needs them rather than globally in an Application object.
I don't think there's a huge overhead for creating such objects and it means that when an Activity is stopped those resources can be freed up. If you create them in the Application object they will always be instantiated, using up memory, even if the current Activity doesn't need them.