When it's necessary to execute invalidate() on a View?

Question

My answer to this question was just accepted but I started to wonder when exactly one needs to invalidate() a View and when it is not necessary?

After a bit of think

Answer 1

Usually, the system handles resizing, hiding, showing and a ton of other things for your widgets automatically but it sometimes has issues if the underlying buffer for drawn pixels or backing data has changed or is stale (you swap the image resource on a View or the raw dataset changes). This occurs because there is no way that the OS can know that the data changed in the specific manner that it did.

In these cases where you are dealing with drawing, you have to tell the system that its underlying data is not in a good state with Widget.invalidate() and the re-drawing gets queued on the main thread just as you mentioned. Depending on the system implementation and Android version what is tracked for changes by the system varies but what I normally do is assume that system resources (byte arrays, char arrays, resource indexes, manual drawing on the context) are not tracked and need an invalidate and everything else will be handled by the system.