Book Image

Asynchronous Android

By : Steve Liles
Book Image

Asynchronous Android

By: Steve Liles

Overview of this book

With more than a million apps available from Google Play, it is more important than ever to build apps that stand out from the crowd. To be successful, apps must react quickly to user input, deliver results in a flash, and sync data in the background. The key to this is understanding the right way to implement asynchronous operations that work with the platform, instead of against it. Asynchronous Android is a practical book that guides you through the concurrency constructs provided by the Android platform, illustrating the applications, benefits, and pitfalls of each.Learn to use AsyncTask correctly to perform operations in the background, keeping user-interfaces running smoothly while avoiding treacherous memory leaks. Discover Handler, HandlerThread and Looper, the related and fundamental building blocks of asynchronous programming in Android. Escape from the constraints of the Activity lifecycle to load and cache data efficiently across your entire application with the Loader framework. Keep your data fresh with scheduled tasks, and understand how Services let your application continue to run in the background, even when the user is busy with something else.Asynchronous Android will help you to build well-behaved apps with smooth, responsive user-interfaces that delight users with speedy results and data that's always fresh, and keep the system happy and the battery charged by playing by the rules.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Asynchronous Android
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Handling exceptions


The callback methods defined by AsyncTask dictate that we cannot throw checked exceptions, so we must wrap any code that throws checked exceptions with try/catch blocks. Unchecked exceptions that propagate out of AsyncTask's methods will crash our application, so we must test carefully and handle these if necessary.

For the callback methods that run on the main thread—onPreExecute, onProgressUpdate, onPostExecute, and onCancelled—we can catch exceptions in the method and directly update the user interface to alert the user.

Of course, exceptions are likely to arise in our doInBackground method too, as this is where the bulk of the work of AsyncTask is done, but unfortunately, we can't update the user interface from doInBackground. A simple solution is to have doInBackground return an object that may contain either the result or an exception, as follows:

static class Result<T> {
  private T actual;
  private Exception exc;
}
@Override
protected final Result<T&gt...