Android “Only the original thread that created a v

Question

I've built a simple music player in Android. The view for each song contains a SeekBar, implemented like this:

public class Song extends Activity implements OnClickListener,Runnable {
    private SeekBar progress;
    private MediaPlayer mp;

    // ...

    private ServiceConnection onService = new ServiceConnection() {
          public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className,
            IBinder rawBinder) {
              appService = ((MPService.LocalBinder)rawBinder).getService(); // service that handles the MediaPlayer
              progress.setVisibility(SeekBar.VISIBLE);
              progress.setProgress(0);
              mp = appService.getMP();
              appService.playSong(title);
              progress.setMax(mp.getDuration());
              new Thread(Song.this).start();
          }
          public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName classname) {
              appService = null;
          }
    };

    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.song);

        // ...

        progress = (SeekBar) findViewById(R.id.progress);

        // ...
    }

    public void run() {
    int pos = 0;
    int total = mp.getDuration();
    while (mp != null && pos<total) {
        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
            pos = appService.getSongPosition();
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            return;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return;
        }
        progress.setProgress(pos);
    }
}

This works fine. Now I want a timer counting the seconds/minutes of the progress of the song. So I put a TextView in the layout, get it with findViewById() in onCreate(), and put this in run() after progress.setProgress(pos):

String time = String.format("%d:%d",
            TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(pos),
            TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toSeconds(pos),
            TimeUnit.MINUTES.toSeconds(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(
                    pos))
            );
currentTime.setText(time);  // currentTime = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.current_time);

But that last line gives me the exception:

android.view.ViewRoot$CalledFromWrongThreadException: Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can touch its views.

Yet I'm doing basically the same thing here as I'm doing with the SeekBar - creating the view in onCreate, then touching it in run() - and it doesn't give me this complaint.

Answer 1

You have to move the portion of the background task that updates the UI onto the main thread. There is a simple piece of code for this:

runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {

    @Override
    public void run() {

        // Stuff that updates the UI

    }
});

Documentation for Activity.runOnUiThread.

Just nest this inside the method that is running in the background, and then copy paste the code that implements any updates in the middle of the block. Include only the smallest amount of code possible, otherwise you start to defeat the purpose of the background thread.

Answer 2

This is explicitly throwing an error. It says whichever thread created a view, only that can touch its views. It is because the created view is inside that thread's space. The view creation (GUI) happens in the UI (main) thread. So, you always use the UI thread to access those methods.

In the above picture, the progress variable is inside the space of the UI thread. So, only the UI thread can access this variable. Here, you're accessing progress via new Thread(), and that's why you got an error.

Answer 3

This is the stack trace of mentioned exception

        at android.view.ViewRootImpl.checkThread(ViewRootImpl.java:6149)
        at android.view.ViewRootImpl.requestLayout(ViewRootImpl.java:843)
        at android.view.View.requestLayout(View.java:16474)
        at android.view.View.requestLayout(View.java:16474)
        at android.view.View.requestLayout(View.java:16474)
        at android.view.View.requestLayout(View.java:16474)
        at android.widget.RelativeLayout.requestLayout(RelativeLayout.java:352)
        at android.view.View.requestLayout(View.java:16474)
        at android.widget.RelativeLayout.requestLayout(RelativeLayout.java:352)
        at android.view.View.setFlags(View.java:8938)
        at android.view.View.setVisibility(View.java:6066)

So if you go and dig then you come to know

void checkThread() {
    if (mThread != Thread.currentThread()) {
        throw new CalledFromWrongThreadException(
                "Only the original thread that created a view hierarchy can touch its views.");
    }
}

Where mThread is initialize in constructor like below

mThread = Thread.currentThread();

All I mean to say that when we created particular view we created it on UI Thread and later try to modifying in a Worker Thread.

We can verify it via below code snippet

Thread.currentThread().getName()

when we inflate layout and later where you are getting exception.