Question

how do you keep the activity from restarting when the screen rotates or when then user slides the keyboard on the phone? Is this possible? Is there a work around or something? All relevant answers are appreciated.

Answer 1

You can do this by declaring a specific attribute in your activity element in your manifest.xml. The element in question is called android:configChanges, and you need to register the string value of orientation.

<activity android:name=".MyActivity"
      android:configChanges="orientation"
      android:label="@string/app_name">

From the documentation:

Now when one of these configurations change, MyActivity is not
restarted. Instead, the Activity receives a call to
onConfigurationChanged(). This method is passed a Configuration object
that specifies the new device configuration. By reading fields in the
Configuration, you can determine the new configuration and make
appropriate changes by updating the resources used in your interface.
At the time this method is called, your Activity’s Resources object is
updated to return resources based on the new configuration, so you can
easily reset elements of your UI without the system restarting your
Activity

So doing this will cause your Activity to not restart, and will also callback to onConfigurationChanged() so that you can handle the change yourself.