setRetainInstance not working for configuration changes in android - android

I have different design for potrait and landscape for activity.so i used layout-land layout .I put webview inside fragment and giving setRetainInstance(true) and loding url like google. when configuration changes it again loading can anybody tell how to avoid that .i didn't mention android:configchanges="orientation" in android manifestfile because
different design can anybody help in this question?
Thanks

Fragments can actually make this a lot easier. Just use the method Fragment.setRetainInstance(boolean) to have your fragment instance retained across configuration changes. Note that this is the recommended replacement for Activity.onRetainnonConfigurationInstance() in the docs.
If for some reason you really don't want to use a retained fragment, there are other approaches you can take. Note that each fragment has a unique identifier returned by Fragment.getId(). You can also find out if a fragment is being torn down for a config change through
Fragment.getActivity().isChangingConfigurations(). So, at the point where you would decide to stop your AsyncTask (in onStop() or onDestroy() most likely), you could for example check if the configuration is changing and if so stick it in a static SparseArray under the fragment's identifier, and then in your onCreate() or onStart() look to see if you have an AsyncTask in the sparse array available.

Related

Best practices: Restore activity state [duplicate]

I'm a little confused about the Activity being destroyed and recreated when the user's device is rotated.
I've been reading around, and I understand the rationale for doing so (it basically 'forces' the developer to make sure they haven't 'missed' anything upon rotation/language/other changes)
I'm happy to respect best practice if it is seen as such, however it begs the question:
How do I 'remember' the state of the game/app, so that when the screen is rotated I have something from which to re-generate what the user was looking at?
From what I can see, absolutely everything is destroyed, the base class constructor runs and all variables in the Activity are 'null'.
I suspect the 'savedInstanceState' (Bundle class) is where I would collect that data, but reading around it only seems to be used for when the app is closed from lack of resources (and a few other extremely fringe cases)
Am I misinformed or misunderstanding the purpose of savedInstanceState? Is it wise to abandon best practice (letting the Activity be destroyed) if I'm mindful enough to not miss anything upon rotation? Thanks in advance for any advice.
I should note this question applies to game programming (I'm not using a layout XML)
Do you need your activity to be recreated? Is there work you want to do on rotation? savedInstanceState is where you would store data to be passed to the recreation of the Activity, but since you aren't using XML layouts you may consider just adding android:configChanges="orientation" to your activity in the manifest. This will give you manual control over what happens during rotation change.
In additional to my original comment, I would override config changes for keyboard being show as well:
android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden"
If there is work you want to do on rotation change you can override onConfigChange and do anything you need there.
It's hard to say that there is a time when you should always override config changes, but I often do it when I have no dependency on resource folders that are size or orientation specific and I'm doing a lot of work that would take too much time to recreate.
There are other best practices to store data while activitiy config changes.1. Developer Doc Handling Runtime Changes2. Alex Lockwood : Handling Configuration Changes with Fragments, This will answer all your questions reagarding config change and storing data.
Impt:
Fragment file to store data. You must set setRetainInstace(true) in order to store data and retrieve while your activity config changes.
#Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
// retain this fragment
setRetainInstance(true);
}

How NOT to re-create activity after orintation in android?

I have activity the contains a ListView, and this listview is filled with data from a web service in onCreate() function ( using AsyncTask). When the screen orientation changes the activity is re-created, I don't want that. how to keep saved after changing the orientation
You need to add this in the Activity in AndroidManifest.xml. Just adding "orientation" will not work on all devices.
android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize"
Set android:configChanges="orientation" in your AndroidManifest.xml for the activity.
Although the other answers suggest using android:configChanges, I would say this is really only a last resort option because it means resources for different orientations will not get loaded automatically.
Instead you should use the onSaveInstanceState or onRetainNonConfigurationInstance functions of your activity. (If you use fragments, you should use setRetainInstance instead of the latter option.)
Another option would be to use a ContentProvider to store the data you download using the AsyncTask into a database so it wouldn't need to be re-downloaded anyway.
You should read this for more information.

Fragment not instantiating correctly

I'm having a problem instantiating Fragments in my program using the Support Library implementation. Here's a brief description of the task I'm attempting to perform and some of my attempts which haven't yet borne fruit:
The UI of my application is subject to change to meet user preferences. In order to do this, I'm using a Fragment for each different layout and replacing the active Fragment in the UI at a given time as per the user's instructions. Here are some ways I've tried (and failed) to do this:
I've tried adding the Fragments as non-static inner classes in my Activity. This approach worked so long as the user did not rotate the device. As soon as the user rotated the device, the application crashed (this is true for Portrait -> Landscape rotation and for Landscape -> Portrait rotation). Upon checking the issue using the emulator, I was getting an InstantiationException. I checked SO for some help, which led me to:
Implement the Fragment as a static inner class. When the Fragment initiates, it will expand its layout, and then from later in the control flow of the Activity, I can do stuff to the Fragment's subviews (in particular, add listeners to the buttons). Unfortunately this didn't work because I couldn't refer to the Fragment's subviews using [frag_name].getView().findViewById(). Something about referencing static objects in a non-static context. Once again, I checked SO, which led me to:
Implement the Fragment as a separate class altogether from the Activity. This seems to be what the Dev docs on developer.android.com recommend. Upon doing this, everything seems to compile fine, but when I try to refer to the Fragment's subviews (once again, using [frag_name].getView().findViewById()), I get a NullPointerException. When I add System.out.println() statements across my code to find out exactly what is happening, I find that the print statement inside onCreateView in the fragment is never getting fired, which implies that onCreateView is never getting triggered.
So now, I'm stuck. What am I doing wrong? The precise implementation of this isn't as important as learning something from the experience so I can get better at Android development, so if seperate classes are better than static classes or vice-versa, I don't really care which I use.
Thanks.
Figured it out. Turns out that in order to do what I wanted, I had to register the Activity as a Listener to each of the Fragments and pass "ready to enable buttons" messages back and forth between the two. To anyone using this question for further research, the guide on how to do that is located on the Android Developer guide, here: http://developer.android.com/training/basics/fragments/communicating.html

setRetainInstance fragment with UI Android

Ok, I created a Fragment with some UI (couple textboxes and stuff) and I used setRetainInstance since Im running an AsyncTask to query a server (request can only be sent once) and I need the result of the AsyncTask. So my question is:
Is it wrong to retain the whole fragment with the UI? I saw couple examples where people use an extra Fragment to use the setRetainInstance but.. is there anything wrong not using that extra one??
If there is an issue with using the setRetainInstance why is that? Couldn't find any info in the documentation regarding this.
Even if you use setRetainInstance(true), your Fragment will still recreate its views when you rotate (you will get a call to onDestroyView and then onCreateView). As long as you don't keep references to views past onDestroyView, there will not be any leaks of the old Activity. The best approach would be to explicitly null the references in onDestroyView, but your code in onCreateView would generally overwrite those references anyway.
There are many examples online (including some official ones) where people use a separate fragment (without a view) to retain data. Assuming what I said above is correct, then this is unnecessary (for the sake of preventing leaks). In many cases, you may end up with cleaner code/architecture if you use a separate fragment whose responsibility is just to handle the data and not worry about the UI.
You can check to see if you are leaking Activity contexts after rotating by using Eclipse MAT.
If you are locking your orientation then you should be fine. Otherwise you can end up with memory leaks if you retain widgets that are associated with a particular activity instance.

Workaround for Android bug pertaining to setRetainInstance(true)

Please check out this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=20791
The project (https://github.com/kaciula/BugRetain) uses a CursorLoader to take 2 values from a database through a content provider and shows them on screen. The scenario is this: From activity A, go to activity B, switch once the orientation and go back to activity A. The values from db are no longer showing.
Can anyone provide a workaround for this issue? The problem doesn't appear with only CursorLoader but with any loader. As a consequence of this bug, I can't write an app with fragments that use setRetainInstance and is available in both orientations. I really need a workaround until the Android guys fix the issue. Any ideas?
Do not set your fragments as retainable if you use Loaders. If you need to store some data between configuration changes, create another retainable fragment and pass this data to him.
A similar example can be found here: FragmentRetainInstanceSupport. But this example uses extra fragment for threading purposes. In your case this extra fragment will be used as data container.

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