Update ListView in the main thread from another thread

Question

I have a separate thread running to get data from the internet. After that, I would like to update the ListView in the main thread by calling adapter.notifyDataSetChanged().

Answer 1

Overall good advice is http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/05/painless-threading.html

Personally I use my custom thread (a class extending Thread ) but send response to the UI thread through a Message. So in the thread's run() function there is:

Message msg;
msg = Message.obtain();
msg.what = MSG_IMG_SET;                     
mExtHandler.sendMessage(msg);

The UI thread defines a message handler.

private Handler mImagesProgressHandler;

public void onCreate(Bundle bundle) {

    mImagesProgressHandler = new Handler() {
        @Override
        public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
            switch (msg.what) {             
            case LoadImagesThread.MSG_IMG_SET:
                mArrayAdapter.setBitmapList(mImagesList);
                mArrayAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
                break;
            case LoadImagesThread.MSG_ERROR:
                break;
            }
            super.handleMessage(msg);
        }
    };                 

This is actually easier than AsyncTask.