Download queue in Android

Question

What\'s the best way to implement a download queue in Android?

I suspect there might be some platform classes that might do most of the work.

Answer 1

From API 11 up, a good approach is to use a FixedThreadPool with async tasks. Do once:

ExecutorService threadPoolExecutor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);

Where 3 is the number of downloads you want to run at the same time. It will queueu the task if there are already 3 downloads running, and automatically handle the task later. Launch your async tasks with:

yourAsynTask.executeOnExecutor(threadPoolExecutor, params);

Params is probably the url you wish to connect to. You can read it out in the onPostExecute of your asynctask, and connect to the server using a HttpURLConnection.

Make sure you call down this on shutdown:

threadPoolExecutor.shutdown()