In my activity there's some stuff going on in a background thread, which gets started in Activity_1. The processing of the background thread takes a while and I want to notify the user when it's completed via an AlertDialog. However, the user might have changed to Activity_2 or Activity_3 in the meantime and I would like to pop up the AlertDialog always in the current Activity.
Any idea how to realize this?
I ended up doing something like this in my background thread. It works, but not sure if it is a "good" solution.
Looper.prepare();
mActivity.showDialogAlertDefault();
Looper.loop();
Looper.myLooper().quit();
This probably means the right way is to use a Service, instead of a plain background thread. Your background work will be more resilient to being paused or shut down, and you don't have to worry about making an AsyncTask that is constantly keeping track of a different Activity parent.
Related
Well I just want to press a button and a countdown appears in it however when I press the button the program stops and finally shows the number 1 but doesn't show 3 or 2.
btnTurno.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener()
{
public void onClick(View v) {
btnTurno.setText("3");
SystemClock.sleep(1000);
btnTurno.setText("2");
SystemClock.sleep(1000);
btnTurno.setText("1");
}
});
What I'm doing wrong?
First of all, Sleep should be called as Thread.sleep(x);
But on the other hand , sleep is NOT recommended since it will block the user interaction with the application.
If you want to make a countdown ( as it looks like what you are doing ), you should look at this
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/CountDownTimer.html
onClick is being executed in single handler message on GUI thread, so each time you change text, it overwrites previous value, so system is not able to redraw view.
Also you should not call sleep() on main gui thread, that will cause ANR - application is notresponding
Setting the text and drawing the text are separate operations that both happen on the same thread. You're setting the text three times before the framework gets the chance to draw anything, so all you see is the last change.
For this to work, you'd need to do your text updates and sleeps on a separate thread. However, you can't make UI calls directly on a different thread, so you need to post your messages.
One approach would be to create an AsyncTask, and use your code above but call publishProgress() where you're currently calling setText(). The publishProgress() call in the async thread results in onProgressUpdate() running in the UI thread; from there, you can call setText() to update the UI.
Edit: the CountDownTimer approach mentioned in a different answer is better.
I know it sounds crazy that someone is using runOnUiThread inside AsyncTask. Somehow, it is working for me but I wanna know if it is an acceptable and robust approach or not. Here is the scenario:
I have an app in which after successful login, user is rendered to next screen. In this new screen, 3 different methods are loading different types of data from a web server. These methods are:
getMembersForList() : It loads the list of community members and shows it in a listview.
getProfileData() : It loads the profile of logged in user and shows his name , image etc on the screen.
getNotificationCounts : It loads the count of new notifications for the user.
I applied 3 different approaches for it :
(1) Calling all 3 methods simply in onCreate i.e. no exclusive thread is being used for any of the methods . In this case , the transition from login screen to this screen becomes very slow and black screen shows up for some time before this activity shows up.
(2) Calling getMembersForList() on UI thread and the other 2 methods on exclusive threads. In this case transition becomes fast and list shows up quickly but Notification counts and username etc. don't show up because WrongThreadException occurs saying that this thread can't touch other thread's views (TextViews for username, notification count etc. which are declared globally) . The same thing happens when I start these threads from an AsyncTask as well.
(3) Calling getMembersForList() on UI thread and then starting an AsyncTask in which the other 2 methods are being called in "runOnUiThread" inside doInBackground() method. This solves both the above issues. Now the screen transition is faster and the WrongThread exception is also not occuring.
So far the approach-(3) is working good for me but I am not sure if this is the right way to do it because runOnUiThread and AsyncTask are 2 completely opposite things. Can anyone please clear my doubts about this scenario. Thanx in advance.
Yes, use-cases like this are a big reason why the runOnUiThread() method exists in the first place. The idea is you allow your background thread(s)/AsyncTask instance(s) to run your lengthy operations in the background, and then provide a simple hook that they can use to update the interface when they have the result (or at arbitrary intervals, as different pieces of the result become available).
As long as that's what you're doing, then your usage is fine. What you want to avoid doing is performing a lengthy operation on the main thread, either directly or indirectly by passing in some lengthy operation from a background thread.
Of course you don't have to do it that way if you don't want to. You could use postExecute() instead. Or you could store the result somewhere and then use any sort of message-passing API to notify the main thread that the result is ready, and so on.
I would advice to run all the 3 calls in the asyncTask, and update the UI in the postExecute() of the AsyncTask after the background taks is complete, postExecute runs on UIthread so you need not call anything explicit to run them on UIthread.
I'm trying to implements a game AI, and I got the following problem :
I'm calling a method from another class my UI Activity class, this method call itself some methods of the UI Activity class (to simulate click on screen among other things), and the things is, at the end of this method, I need to "pause" the game a few seconds to let the user see what did the AI.
So I tried running the method in another thread, but I got the error message providing from editing a widget from another thread. I tried to sleep the UI thread, but by doing that, the user can't use the scrollview anymore, and the changes aren't display before the sleep but after.
So I'd like to know how can I do this ?
(I've read some topics about AsyncTask, Handler, but can't make it work the way I need)
Thank's
You need runOnUiThread.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#runOnUiThread(java.lang.Runnable)
http://steve.odyfamily.com/?p=12
in my app, i'm uploading some files that can take up to several minutes. i'm thinking of a way to notify the user about activity going on passively by adding a progress bar in my custom title bar. what i want to do is have every activity, each which uses the custom titles, appear with the progress bar until the thread finishes and does a callback which would make invisible the progress bar. can something like this be accomplished?
what seems to make this impossible is that if the user is in an activity with the view loaded, the thread finishing callback would have to manipulate the loaded view resources to disable the progess bar which doesn't seem feasible. are there any suggestions to accomplish this or alternative solutions in keeping a global and passive indication of something going in the background?
You can use a service to achieve this. Services
Basically how it would work, is you bind to the service in each activity when you create the activity. You use this service to start your upload method.
When you bind to the service you pass a handler, which is then used to update your UI in that specific activity. The service will never directly affect the UI (it will be running on a separate thread) instead the handler passes a message back to the UI thread with data in a Bundle, such as upload progress, or a bool to say it's finished.
I have a comment activity that loads a Thread and sends some data to a server; the activity is immediately finished once the submit button is pressed.
The user is then free to do other things in my application.
When the server responds an AlertDialog is shown.
The problem is that since the initial context has been destroyed, my application crashes.
I tried getApplicationContext() but still get an exception.
Put your network stuff in a Service, then show a status bar notification instead of a dialog.
Take a look at AsyncTask
From JavaDocs:
AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class allows to perform background operations and publish results on the UI thread without having to manipulate threads and/or handlers.