Question

Hello fellow developers,

I am trying to achieve something in Android and I would like some advise on the best practice.

I have created an Activity which can start and stop a Service which collects data.

Instead of simply starting and stopping the Service, the Activity should also display the data collected by the Service.

Here in lies the problem. The data could be quite large so I would like to avoid Serializing and sending it via an Intent. Is it possible to simply get a reference to the data stored in the Service from the Activity?

Simple Example

1) Activity starts

2) Activity starts Service to collect data

3) Activity exists

4) 24 hours pass

5) Activity starts

6) Activity wants to display data collected by Service, but data is quite large.

My question again is simply this. Can the Activity get a reference to the data stored in Service or does the data have to be Serialized and sent from the Service to the Activity using an Intent?

Kind regards,
Cathal

Answer 1

Research android.app.Application class. Essentially you can use this for global state.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Application.html

Also, any long term data should be stored to a local database. I would try to limit the SELECT to certain number of records to reduce memory footprint.