Prevent dialog dismissal on screen rotation in And

Question

I am trying to prevent dialogs built with Alert builder from being dismissed when the Activity is restarted.

If I overload the onConfigurationChanged method I can successfully do this and reset the layout to correct orientation but I lose sticky text feature of edittext. So in solving the dialog problem I have created this edittext problem.

If I save the strings from the edittext and reassign them in the onCofiguration change they still seem to default to initial value not what was entered before rotation. Even if I force an invalidate does seem to update them.

I really need to solve either the dialog problem or the edittext problem.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem: when the screen orientation changed, the dialog's onDismiss listener was called even though the user didn't dismiss the dialog. I was able to work around this by instead using the onCancel listener, which triggered both when the user pressed the back button and when the user touched outside of the dialog.

Answer 2

You can combine the Dialog's onSave/onRestore methods with the Activity's onSave/onRestore methods to keep the state of the Dialog.

Note: This method works for those "simple" Dialogs, such as displaying an alert message. It won't reproduce the contents of a WebView embedded in a Dialog. If you really want to prevent a complex dialog from dismissal during rotation, try Chung IW's method.

@Override
protected void onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
     super.onRestoreInstanceState(savedInstanceState);
     myDialog.onRestoreInstanceState(savedInstanceState.getBundle("DIALOG"));
     // Put your codes to retrieve the EditText contents and 
     // assign them to the EditText here.
}

@Override
protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
     super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);
     // Put your codes to save the EditText contents and put them 
     // to the outState Bundle here.
     outState.putBundle("DIALOG", myDialog.onSaveInstanceState());
}

Answer 3

It seems that this is still an issue, even when "doing everything right" and using DialogFragment etc.

There is a thread on Google Issue Tracker which claims that it is due to an old dismiss message being left in the message queue. The provided workaround is quite simple:

    @Override
    public void onDestroyView() {
        /* Bugfix: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36929400 */
        if (getDialog() != null && getRetainInstance())
            getDialog().setDismissMessage(null);

        super.onDestroyView();
    }

Incredible that this is still needed 7 years after that issue was first reported.

Answer 4

If you're changing the layout on orientation change I wouldn't put android:configChanges="orientation" in your manifest because you're recreating the views anyway.

Save the current state of your activity (like text entered, shown dialog, data displayed etc.) using these methods:

@Override
protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
    super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);
}

@Override
protected void onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onRestoreInstanceState(savedInstanceState);
}

That way the activity goes through onCreate again and afterwards calls the onRestoreInstanceState method where you can set your EditText value again.

If you want to store more complex Objects you can use

@Override
public Object onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() {
}

Here you can store any object and in onCreate you just have to call getLastNonConfigurationInstance(); to get the Object.

Answer 5

Definitely, the best approach is by using DialogFragment.

Here is mine solution of wrapper class that helps to prevent different dialogs from being dismissed within one Fragment (or Activity with small refactoring). Also, it helps to avoid massive code refactoring if for some reasons there are a lot of AlertDialogs scattered among the code with slight differences between them in terms of actions, appearance or something else.

public class DialogWrapper extends DialogFragment {
    private static final String ARG_DIALOG_ID = "ARG_DIALOG_ID";

    private int mDialogId;

    /**
     * Display dialog fragment.
     * @param invoker  The fragment which will serve as {@link AlertDialog} alert dialog provider
     * @param dialogId The ID of dialog that should be shown
     */
    public static <T extends Fragment & DialogProvider> void show(T invoker, int dialogId) {
        Bundle args = new Bundle();
        args.putInt(ARG_DIALOG_ID, dialogId);
        DialogWrapper dialogWrapper = new DialogWrapper();
        dialogWrapper.setArguments(args);
        dialogWrapper.setTargetFragment(invoker, 0);
        dialogWrapper.show(invoker.getActivity().getSupportFragmentManager(), null);
    }

    @Override
    public void onCreate(@Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        mDialogId = getArguments().getInt(ARG_DIALOG_ID);
    }

    @NonNull
    @Override
    public Dialog onCreateDialog(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        return getDialogProvider().getDialog(mDialogId);
    }

    private DialogProvider getDialogProvider() {
        return (DialogProvider) getTargetFragment();
    }

    public interface DialogProvider {
        Dialog getDialog(int dialogId);
    }
}

When it comes to Activity you can invoke getContext() inside onCreateDialog(), cast it to the DialogProvider interface and request a specific dialog by mDialogId. All logic to dealing with a target fragment should be deleted.

Usage from fragment:

public class MainFragment extends Fragment implements DialogWrapper.DialogProvider {
    private static final int ID_CONFIRMATION_DIALOG = 0;

    @Override
    public void onViewCreated(View view, @Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        Button btnHello = (Button) view.findViewById(R.id.btnConfirm);
        btnHello.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                DialogWrapper.show(MainFragment.this, ID_CONFIRMATION_DIALOG);
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public Dialog getDialog(int dialogId) {
        switch (dialogId) {
            case ID_CONFIRMATION_DIALOG:
                return createConfirmationDialog(); //Your AlertDialog
            default:
                throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unknown dialog id: " + dialogId);
        }
    }
}

You can read the complete article on my blog How to prevent Dialog being dismissed? and play with the source code.