How to handle screen orientation change when progress dialog and background thread active?

Question

My program does some network activity in a background thread. Before starting, it pops up a progress dialog. The dialog is dismissed on the handler. This all works fine, exc

Answer 1

I met the same problem. My activity needs to parse some data from a URL and it's slow. So I create a thread to do so, then show a progress dialog. I let the thread post a message back to UI thread via Handler when it's finished. In Handler.handleMessage, I get the data object (ready now) from thread and populate it to UI. So it's very similar to your example.

After a lot of trial and error it looks like I found a solution. At least now I can rotate screen at any moment, before or after the thread is done. In all tests, the dialog is properly closed and all behaviors are as expected.

What I did is shown below. The goal is to fill my data model (mDataObject) and then populate it to UI. Should allow screen rotation at any moment without surprise.

class MyActivity {

    private MyDataObject mDataObject = null;
    private static MyThread mParserThread = null; // static, or make it singleton

    OnCreate() {
        ...
        Object retained = this.getLastNonConfigurationInstance();
        if(retained != null) {
            // data is already completely obtained before config change
            // by my previous self.
            // no need to create thread or show dialog at all
            mDataObject = (MyDataObject) retained;
            populateUI();
        } else if(mParserThread != null && mParserThread.isAlive()){
            // note: mParserThread is a static member or singleton object.
            // config changed during parsing in previous instance. swap handler
            // then wait for it to finish.
            mParserThread.setHandler(new MyHandler());
        } else {
            // no data and no thread. likely initial run
            // create thread, show dialog
            mParserThread = new MyThread(..., new MyHandler());
            mParserThread.start();
            showDialog(DIALOG_PROGRESS);
        }
    }

    // http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/02/faster-screen-orientation-change.html
    public Object onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() {
        // my future self can get this without re-downloading
        // if it's already ready.
        return mDataObject;
    }

    // use Activity.showDialog instead of ProgressDialog.show
    // so the dialog can be automatically managed across config change
    @Override
    protected Dialog onCreateDialog(int id) {
        // show progress dialog here
    }

    // inner class of MyActivity
    private class MyHandler extends Handler {
        public void handleMessage(msg) {
            mDataObject = mParserThread.getDataObject();
            populateUI();
            dismissDialog(DIALOG_PROGRESS);
        }
    }
}

class MyThread extends Thread {
    Handler mHandler;
    MyDataObject mDataObject;

    // constructor with handler param
    public MyHandler(..., Handler h) {
        ...
        mHandler = h;
    }

    public void setHandler(Handler h) { mHandler = h; } // for handler swapping after config change
    public MyDataObject getDataObject() { return mDataObject; } // return data object (completed) to caller

    public void run() {
        mDataObject = new MyDataObject();
        // do the lengthy task to fill mDataObject with data
        lengthyTask(mDataObject);
        // done. notify activity
        mHandler.sendEmptyMessage(0); // tell activity: i'm ready. come pick up the data.
    }
}

That's what works for me. I don't know if this is the "correct" method as designed by Android -- they claim this "destroy/recreate activity during screen rotation" actually makes things easier, so I guess it shouldn't be too tricky.

Let me know if you see a problem in my code. As said above I don't really know if there is any side effect.