getActivity() returns null in Fragment function

Question

I have a fragment (F1) with a public method like this

public void asd() {
    if (getActivity() == null) {
        Log.d(\"yes\",\"it is null\");
    }
}
         


        

Answer 1

The other answers that suggest keeping a reference to the activity in onAttach are just suggesting a bandaid to the real problem. When getActivity returns null it means that the Fragment is not attached to the Activity. Most commonly this happens when the Activity has gone away due to rotation or the Activity being finished but the Fragment still has some kind of callback listener registered. When the listener gets called if you need to do something with the Activity but the Activity is gone there isn't much you can do. In your code you should just check getActivity() != null and if it's not there then don't do anything. If you keep a reference to the Activity that is gone you are preventing the Activity from being garbage collected. Any UI things you might try to do won't be seen by the user. I can imagine some situations where in the callback listener you want to have a Context for something non-UI related, in those cases it probably makes more sense to get the Application context. Note that the only reason that the onAttach trick isn't a big memory leak is because normally after the callback listener executes it won't be needed anymore and can be garbage collected along with the Fragment, all its View's and the Activity context. If you setRetainInstance(true) there is a bigger chance of a memory leak because the Activity field will also be retained but after rotation that could be the previous Activity not the current one.