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

These days there is a much more distinct way to handle these types of issues. The typical approach is:

1. Ensure your data is properly seperated from the UI:

Anything that is a background process should be in a retained Fragment (set this with Fragment.setRetainInstance(). This becomes your 'persistent data storage' where anything data based that you would like retained is kept. After the orientation change event, this Fragment will still be accessible in its original state through a FragmentManager.findFragmentByTag() call (when you create it you should give it a tag not an ID as it is not attached to a View).

See the Handling Runtime Changes developed guide for information about doing this correctly and why it is the best option.

2. Ensure you are interfacing correctly and safely between the background processs and your UI:

You must reverse your linking process. At the moment your background process attaches itself to a View - instead your View should be attaching itself to the background process. It makes more sense right? The View's action is dependent on the background process, whereas the background process is not dependent on the View.This means changing the link to a standard Listener interface. Say your process (whatever class it is - whether it is an AsyncTask, Runnable or whatever) defines a OnProcessFinishedListener, when the process is done it should call that listener if it exists.

This answer is a nice concise description of how to do custom listeners.

3. Link your UI into the data process whenever the UI is created (including orientation changes):

Now you must worry about interfacing the background task with whatever your current View structure is. If you are handling your orientation changes properly (not the configChanges hack people always recommend), then your Dialog will be recreated by the system. This is important, it means that on the orientation change, all your Dialog's lifecycle methods are recalled. So in any of these methods (onCreateDialog is usually a good place), you could do a call like the following:

DataFragment f = getActivity().getFragmentManager().findFragmentByTag("BACKGROUND_TAG");
if (f != null) {
    f.mBackgroundProcess.setOnProcessFinishedListener(new OnProcessFinishedListener() {
        public void onProcessFinished() {
            dismiss();
        }
    });
 }

See the Fragment lifecycle for deciding where setting the listener best fits in your individual implementation.

This is a general approach to providing a robust and complete solution to the generic problem asked in this question. There is probably a few minor pieces missing in this answer depending on your individual scenario, but this is generally the most correct approach for properly handling orientation change events.