How to run background tasks in Android - java

I'm trying to design an application that does two different tasks in parallel
each task start executing when the user presses a button in the activity "so I have three Activities two of them should do some tasks and the third one should collect the result".
When the user presses the button on the activity it will invoke a thread and then will Load the next Activity
In the third activity I have a button "I called it Send Button " that should stay inactive or disabled until all threads finish their work so at that moment it will be enabled and this activity contains plain text to show the result from these two threads and when the user presses this button it will send the information in the plain text to a web site.
My questions are : how can I run Threads in a different activity and send their result to another one? and how can I make that "Send Button" disabled until all threads finish their work.
I tried to make a while loop using a global variable in the onCreate method in the Third activity but it crashes the application and the activity didn't start up

You have two options to do a long running background task:
Using a thread which does your background work, with an singelton to access the results
Using a services which does the calculations
Depending on your actual use case the service is the first choice.

Use an Activity only when you need user interaction to your application. Else you can invoke both the threads using AsyncTask for your jobs(If you want the system to handle the worker threads for you. And unless you do not do any config changes on the fly -> performance hit).
Please keep in mind that, you should use AsyncTask only when the background jobs run for dew seconds. If you have a long running job, then use a service with a custom thread.
Hope this helped.

You can use AsyncTask. AsyncTask is one Class which is used to perform background processes without having threads. You can easily check the process is completed or not. Check this Tutorial. This can help you to understand how to run background process using an AsyncTask.

Related

Android: how to enable button after all background threads finished

I'm a newbie in android and it seems to be simple, but I have following app structure.
App has button in main activity (which became disabled after click) and two tab fragments.
Active tab fragment run approx 20 threads via model-class.
So only model-class knows when all threads finished, but using view element in model is awful decision.
How to enable button after all background threads finished?
Timeout is bad choice, because no one knows on what device code will be performed and it can takes some time. Thread.join() or wait() hangs ui in my case.
Appreciate for any suggestions. I can provide code if it's necessary, but question seems to be general.
You should create a new Interface that works as Listener that listens to the event of threads in the model-class
Or
Using callBack() to notify the MainActivity when the threads finished to set back the button enable.
To create a new Listener please refer to this Question:
How to create our own Listener interface in android?

Automatic log out for whole application

I have an application which has many activities that logins towards a web service. However my client want this application to log out after a certain timing of inactivity. Which includes screen off or no user interaction. I used the timer before but it will only work on a single activity and if i were to set the timer for 2 activities, 2 timers will be started and i'm not able to reset the previous timer when it moves on to the next activity.
I've thought that if i create a java class and extends Activity and all activities shares the same timer. Which means each time I need to start a timer, I will call the method on the java class.
Please advise or give suggestions on what actually should be done

How to stop UI thread until network operation is completed

I am using volley library to perform network operations. On Application launch, I hit the service, I want to stop all the operations until i get the response from the service.
So i want to perform this synchronously. As I am using Volley which by default works in a separate thread. So how can i do this.
I have created custom Interface/listener to handle this, but does Android provide some way to achieve this.
I have done following.
Splash Activity implements an interface, and it goes to Main Activity after data is loaded
#Override
public void onContainerLoaded() {
//startActivity(MainActivity)
}
Even if you want to, you should definitely never EVER run any network-related task synchronously.
What you can do instead is starting your activity normally, and replace your layout with a progressbar logo, that is set to visibility.gone when your task is completed.
EDIT : By the way, if you are just starting your app and you haven't done anything concrete yet, I would recommend you to use an AsyncTask instead of Volley, which is often causing layer-coupling mistakes.
Use some event bus such as Otto
Create an event, make your main activity subscribe to the event using the event bus, start your operation, display a "Loading..." or something ProgressDialog in your main activity. From your worker thread when it completes send an event to your main activity. Make your main activity close the "Loading" dialog when it receives the event,
I guess a better question would be why you want to force it on the main thread?
As far as I know, volley won't let you do that but you might be able to if you make your own network operation. After Honeycomb, you will get a NetworkOnMainThreadException so you will need to override the policies.

Android activity LifeCycle, whitch method to run while loop when app is runnig?

I have created an app that is searhcing for bigger and bigger primes and saves them in a textfile. Right know im letting the user to click a button to make the app search for bigger primes and save the to file.
Istead of clicking i want the app to run a while loop in the background and do the searching and saving by it self without any user interaction.
Is the onStart(); a good method to put the while loop in so it runs in the background while the app is running?
Also should i use te Runnable interface to dynamically show the user wich prime is found and saved to the file?
Thank you in advance!
You can use Service if your while loop will do a lot of work or consider using AsyncTask (a few seconds at the most.).
A Service is an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use (here)
AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread.here
As mentioned #EpicPandaForce, if you're doing a CPU intensive(mp3 for eg.) consider using an IntentService because it is executed on another thread.

Howto to associate a progressdialog with a service in Android

I have a sync service using AsyncTask. Due to its objective (sync), I prefer to block the user and show him a progressdialog. (And error if exists)
Another difficulty is that I have about 8 AsyncTask running simultaneously. So I can't do a simple call to the progress dialog page when I begin the work and a close when it's finished. It's more complex.
Can someone help me with that task ?
Regards
onPreExecute(), onProgressUpdate(Progress...) and onPostExecute(Result) in AsyncTask are invoked on the UI thread. You can use these to display a progress bar, update it as the syncing progresses and hiding it when the work is finished.
As to the 8 simultaneous async tasks, do you really need 8 concurrent tasks? Can't you run them sequentially on one background thread using a single AsyncTask?
In the first place the point of the Service is that you don't need/want to block user to do stuff because it happens in the background. To that aspect, a Service doesn't have a UI thread, so if you want a progress bar shown in your Activity you'll have to send an Intent back to your activity (using broadcast receivers), such that you can switch the progress bar on/off and do other magic.
I would not recommend blocking the user though, because the tasks you are doing might take a very long time, giving a nasty user experience. You might even want to reconsider using a Service at all (if the data you are fetching is only used locally; for example fetch the latest twitter messages or something) and just go with an ASyncTask in your Activity, unless the data your Service fetches is used in other parts of your app as well (widgets for example) and you want that data available even if the activity isn't running.
You can make use of progress dialog to show wait cursor kinda thing.
Also you can imitate the concept of CountDownLatch in your application to dismiss the cursor. Like you can have a static function in a class like updateTaskComplete and update a static counter. And once the counter is equal to number of async task then in the function updateTaskComplete cancel the progress cursor. I mean you have to do something on this line.

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