Question

Does anyone know how to easily arrange multiple calls to an AsyncTask execution in a queue or something and then execute them in a serial fashion?

I want the called async task to wait while the one before it is finished, but is seems I can’t accomplish this, even if I test the status of the one currently being executed.

Any ideas how to solve this? I’ve seen that in the honeycomb API there is a method executeOnExecutor() with a SERIAL_EXECUTOR, I guess it implements what I’ve described. However, I’m not developing for honeycomb.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You might try IntentService. From the reference:

IntentService is a base class for Services that handle asynchronous requests (expressed as Intents) on demand. Clients send requests through startService(Intent) calls; the service is started as needed, handles each Intent in turn using a worker thread, and stops itself when it runs out of work.

I ran the service from a broadcast receiver as follows:

    // Now let the service module do the rest

    Intent serviceIntent = new Intent(context, Service.class);
    serviceIntent.putExtra(GC.EXTRA_SERVICE_DATA, serviceData);
    ComponentName compName = context.startService(serviceIntent)

It worked as advertised. The requests are serialized fine. The service started when a request was received. The service stopped after the last request processed. The requests were processed FIFO.

I created the intentservice using right click on the source package name and selecting New/Class. I used intentservice as the superclass. The constructor has an arguement of ‘name’. I changed it to:

    public XxxService() {super("XxxService");}

All of the code for the service went into the onHandleIntent function. I didn’t have to use any other @Override functions.

Hope this is what you wanted…

Notes: The variable ‘context’ is a passed parameter in onReceive. I changed the names in the code from XxxxService to ‘Service’ or ‘service’. Finally, I create a class in all my projects called GC. It is a container class for global constants. GC.EXTRA_SERVICE_DATA is a global String defining the extra key.