How to handle screen orientation change when progr

Question

My program does some network activity in a background thread. Before starting, it pops up a progress dialog. The dialog is dismissed on the handler. This all works fine, except when screen orientation changes while the dialog is up (and the background thread is going). At this point the app either crashes, or deadlocks, or gets into a weird stage where the app does not work at all until all the threads have been killed.

How can I handle the screen orientation change gracefully?

The sample code below matches roughly what my real program does:

public class MyAct extends Activity implements Runnable {
    public ProgressDialog mProgress;

    // UI has a button that when pressed calls send

    public void send() {
         mProgress = ProgressDialog.show(this, "Please wait", 
                      "Please wait", 
                      true, true);
        Thread thread = new Thread(this);
        thread.start();
    }

    public void run() {
        Thread.sleep(10000);
        Message msg = new Message();
        mHandler.sendMessage(msg);
    }

    private final Handler mHandler = new Handler() {
        @Override
        public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
            mProgress.dismiss();
        }
    };
}

Stack:

E/WindowManager(  244): Activity MyAct has leaked window com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$DecorView@433b7150 that was originally added here
E/WindowManager(  244): android.view.WindowLeaked: Activity MyAct has leaked window com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$DecorView@433b7150 that was originally added here
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.ViewRoot.<init>(ViewRoot.java:178)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.WindowManagerImpl.addView(WindowManagerImpl.java:147)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.WindowManagerImpl.addView(WindowManagerImpl.java:90)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.Window$LocalWindowManager.addView(Window.java:393)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.app.Dialog.show(Dialog.java:212)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.app.ProgressDialog.show(ProgressDialog.java:103)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.app.ProgressDialog.show(ProgressDialog.java:91)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at MyAct.send(MyAct.java:294)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at MyAct$4.onClick(MyAct.java:174)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.View.performClick(View.java:2129)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.View.onTouchEvent(View.java:3543)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.widget.TextView.onTouchEvent(TextView.java:4664)
E/WindowManager(  244):     at android.view.View.dispatchTouchEvent(View.java:3198)

I have tried to dismiss the progress dialog in onSaveInstanceState, but that just prevents an immediate crash. The background thread is still going, and the UI is in partially drawn state. Need to kill the whole app before it starts working again.

Answer 1

This is my proposed solution:

• Move the AsyncTask or Thread to a retained Fragment, as explained here. I believe it is a good practice to move all network calls to fragments. If you are already using fragments, one of them could be made responsible for the calls. Otherwise, you can create a fragment just for doing the request, as the linked article proposes.
• The fragment will use a listener interface to signal the task completion/failure. You don't have to worry for orientation changes there. The fragment will always have the correct link to the current activity and progress dialog can be safely resumed.
• Make your progress dialog a member of your class. In fact you should do that for all dialogs. In the onPause method you should dismiss them, otherwise you will leak a window on the configuration change. The busy state should be kept by the fragment. When the fragment is attached to the activity, you can bring up the progress dialog again, if the call is still running. A void showProgressDialog() method can be added to the fragment-activity listener interface for this purpose.

Answer 2

The simplest and most flexible solution is to use an AsyncTask with a static reference to ProgressBar. This provides an encapsulated and thus reusable solution to orientation change problems. This solution has served me well for varying asyncronous tasks including internet downloads, communicating with Services, and filesystem scans. The solution has been well tested on multiple android versions and phone models. A complete demo can be found here with specific interest in DownloadFile.java

I present the following as a concept example

public class SimpleAsync extends AsyncTask<String, Integer, String> {
    private static ProgressDialog mProgressDialog = null;
    private final Context mContext;

    public SimpleAsync(Context context) {
        mContext = context;
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            onPreExecute();
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        mProgressDialog = new ProgressDialog( mContext );
        mProgressDialog.show();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            mProgressDialog.dismiss();
            mProgressDialog = null;
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) {
        mProgressDialog.setProgress( progress[0] );
    }

    @Override
    protected String doInBackground(String... sUrl) {
        // Do some work here
        publishProgress(1);
        return null;
    }

    public void dismiss() {
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            mProgressDialog.dismiss();
        }
    }
}

Usage in an Android Activity is simple

public class MainActivity extends Activity {
    DemoServiceClient mClient = null;
    DownloadFile mDownloadFile = null;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate( savedInstanceState );
        setContentView( R.layout.main );
        mDownloadFile = new DownloadFile( this );

        Button downloadButton = (Button) findViewById( R.id.download_file_button );
        downloadButton.setOnClickListener( new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View view) {
                mDownloadFile.execute( "http://www.textfiles.com/food/bakebred.txt");
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        mDownloadFile.dismiss();
    }
}

Answer 3

i have found and easier solution to handle threads when orientation change. You can just keep an static reference to your activity/fragment and verify if its null before acting on the ui. I suggest using a try catch too:

 public class DashListFragment extends Fragment {
     private static DashListFragment ACTIVE_INSTANCE;

     @Override
     public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        ACTIVE_INSTANCE = this;

        new Handler().postDelayed(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                try {
                        if (ACTIVE_INSTANCE != null) {
                            setAdapter(); // this method do something on ui or use context
                        }
                }
                catch (Exception e) {}


            }
        }, 1500l);

    }

    @Override
    public void onDestroy() {
        super.onDestroy();

        ACTIVE_INSTANCE = null;
    }


}

Answer 4

If you create a background Service that does all the heavy lifting (tcp requests/response, unmarshalling), the View and Activity can be destroyed and re-created without leaking window or losing data. This allows the Android recommended behavior, which is to destroy an Activity on each configuration change (eg. for each orientation change).

It is a bit more complex, but it is the best way for invoking server request, data pre/post-processing, etc.

You may even use your Service to queue each request to a server, so it makes it easy and efficient to handle those things.

The dev guide has a full chapter on Services.

Answer 5

If you're struggling with detecting orientation change events of a dialog INDEPENDENT OF AN ACTIVITY REFERENCE, this method works excitingly well. I use this because I have my own dialog class that can be shown in multiple different Activities so I don't always know which Activity it's being shown in. With this method you don't need to change the AndroidManifest, worry about Activity references, and you don't need a custom dialog (as I have). You do need, however, a custom content view so you can detect the orientation changes using that particular view. Here's my example:

Setup

public class MyContentView extends View{
    public MyContentView(Context context){
        super(context);
    }

    @Override
    public void onConfigurationChanged(Configuration newConfig){
        super.onConfigurationChanged(newConfig);

        //DO SOMETHING HERE!! :D
    }
}

Implementation 1 - Dialog

Dialog dialog = new Dialog(context);
//set up dialog
dialog.setContentView(new MyContentView(context));
dialog.show();

Implementation 2 - AlertDialog.Builder

AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(context);
//set up dialog builder
builder.setView(new MyContentView(context));        //Can use this method
builder.setCustomTitle(new MycontentView(context)); // or this method
builder.build().show();

Implementation 3 - ProgressDialog / AlertDialog

ProgressDialog progress = new ProgressDialog(context);
//set up progress dialog
progress.setView(new MyContentView(context));        //Can use this method
progress.setCustomTitle(new MyContentView(context)); // or this method
progress.show();

Answer 6

I have an implementation which allows the activity to be destroyed on a screen orientation change, but still destroys the dialog in the recreated activity successfully. I use ...NonConfigurationInstance to attach the background task to the recreated activity. The normal Android framework handles recreating the dialog itself, nothing is changed there.

I subclassed AsyncTask adding a field for the 'owning' activity, and a method to update this owner.

class MyBackgroundTask extends AsyncTask<...> {
  MyBackgroundTask (Activity a, ...) {
    super();
    this.ownerActivity = a;
  }

  public void attach(Activity a) {
    ownerActivity = a;
  }

  protected void onPostExecute(Integer result) {
    super.onPostExecute(result);
    ownerActivity.dismissDialog(DIALOG_PROGRESS);
  }

  ...
}

In my activity class I added a field backgroundTask referring to the 'owned' backgroundtask, and I update this field using onRetainNonConfigurationInstance and getLastNonConfigurationInstance.

class MyActivity extends Activity {
  public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    ...
    if (getLastNonConfigurationInstance() != null) {
      backgroundTask = (MyBackgroundTask) getLastNonConfigurationInstance();
      backgroundTask.attach(this);
    }
  }

  void startBackgroundTask() {
    backgroundTask = new MyBackgroundTask(this, ...);
    showDialog(DIALOG_PROGRESS);
    backgroundTask.execute(...);
  }

  public Object onRetainNonConfigurationInstance() {
    if (backgroundTask != null && backgroundTask.getStatus() != Status.FINISHED)
      return backgroundTask;
    return null;
  }
  ...
}

Suggestions for further improvement:

• Clear the backgroundTask reference in the activity after the task is finished to release any memory or other resources associated with it.
• Clear the ownerActivity reference in the backgroundtask before the activity is destroyed in case it will not be recreated immediately.
• Create a BackgroundTask interface and/or collection to allow different types of tasks to run from the same owning activity.