Question

Given the use case where the user has to perform an online transaction, eg online payment, using the app.

This should be done without blocking the UI, so i was going to use AsyncTask. The problem is with the following scenario:
– the user rotates the phone or gets an incoming call in the middle of the transacion, thus causing the activity to be destryed.

If I understood correctly the asynctask now has a reference to a stale object. So after the transaction is done, there is no way to inform the user about the result. Is it?

Should be use a service instead?

Answer 1

What is a Service?

Most confusion about the Service class actually revolves around what it is not:

• A Service is not a separate process. The Service object itself does not imply it is running in its own process; unless otherwise specified, it runs in the same process as the application it is part of.
• A Service is not a thread. It is not a means itself to do work off of the main thread (to avoid Application Not Responding errors).

Should you use a service or a thread?

A service is simply a component that can run in the background even when the user is not interacting with your application. Thus, you should create a service only if that is what you need.

If you need to perform work outside your main thread, but only while the user is interacting with your application, then you should probably instead create a new thread and not a service. For example, if you want to play some music, but only while your activity is running, you might create a thread in onCreate(), start running it in onStart(), then stop it in onStop(). Also consider using AsyncTask or HandlerThread, instead of the traditional Thread class. See the Processes and Threading document for more information about threads.

Remember that if you do use a service, it still runs in your application’s main thread by default, so you should still create a new thread within the service if it performs intensive or blocking operations.

What causing the activity to be destryed when user rotates the phone?

If the configuration of the device (as defined by the Resources.Configuration class) changes, then anything displaying a user interface will need to update to match that configuration. Because Activity is the primary mechanism for interacting with the user, it includes special support for handling configuration changes.

Unless you specify otherwise, a configuration change (such as a change in screen orientation, language, input devices, etc) will cause your current activity to be destroyed, going through the normal activity lifecycle process of onPause(), onStop(), and onDestroy() as appropriate. If the activity had been in the foreground or visible to the user, once onDestroy() is called in that instance then a new instance of the activity will be created, with whatever savedInstanceState the previous instance had generated from onSaveInstanceState(Bundle).

Possible workaround to solve AsyncTask interruption due to Activity recreation:

In some special cases, you may want to bypass restarting of your activity based on one or more types of configuration changes. This is done with the android:configChanges attribute in its manifest. For any types of configuration changes you say that you handle there, you will receive a call to your current activity’s onConfigurationChanged(Configuration) method instead of being restarted. If a configuration change involves any that you do not handle, however, the activity will still be restarted and onConfigurationChanged(Configuration) will not be called.