Forcing Android to not redraw activity on orientation change

Question

I have been going gaga to figure this out.
Although I have read a lot that on Orientation Change, Android kills an activity and starts it as a fresh one, and the only w

Answer 1

Yes, you can add attribute android:configChanges="orientation" to the activity declaration in the AndroidManifest.xml file.

IMHO, it's better to declare android:configChanges="orientation|keyboard|keyboardHidden"

About the blog post you gave the link in another answers. I guess here is the answer:

If your application doesn't need to update resources during a specific configuration change and you have a performance limitation that requires you to avoid the Activity restart, then you can declare that your Activity handles the configuration change itself, which prevents the system from restarting your Activity.

I spoke as well with an android developer about this problem. And he meant following. If you don't have different layouts for landscape and portrait orientation, you can easy use configChanges.

Answer 2

if you are doing a lot of networking inside Asynchronous task maybe you should use onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() ans then get the data back in your onCreate() method like this tutorial or this