Question

I admit, I’m new at this whole Android stuff. I am trying to make an app but randomly I get Force close errors and I really don’t know why. My application has many activities, none of them finish() when I start a new one. I get data from the web (via web services and direct image downloading) and I use AsyncTask a lot. Most of the time it crashes on the asynctask. Here is a sample on how I do things:

private BackTask backTask;
Activity ctx = this;

    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
            setContentView(R.layout.trackslist);

        backTask = new BackTask();
            backTask.execute();
    }

    protected class BackTask extends AsyncTask<Context, String, myObject>
        {
            @Override
            protected myObject doInBackground(Context... params) 
            {
                 try{
                        if (hasInternet(ctx)==true)
                        {
                            //access the web SERVICE here
                        //initialize myObject WITH result FROM the web
                         return myObject
                       }
                       else
                       {
                            return null
                       }

                  }catch(Exception ex){
                       return null;
                }
            }

            @Override
            protected void onPreExecute()
            {
                    super.onPreExecute();
            }

            @Override
            protected void onProgressUpdate(String... values) 
            {
                    super.onProgressUpdate(values);
            }

            @Override
            protected void onCancelled()
            {
                    super.onCancelled();
            }

            @Override
            protected void onPostExecute( myObject result ) 
            {
                    super.onPostExecute(result);
                    if (result==null || result.isEmpty())
                    {
                           //no valid result, show a message
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        //result valid do something with it
                    }
            }
        }

     @Override
        public void onPause()
        {
            if (backTask!=null && ! backTask.isCancelled())
            {
                backTask.cancel(true);
            }
            super.onPause();
        }

    public void btnStartOnClick(View target) {
          Intent intent = new Intent(this, MyNewActivity.class); 
      startActivity(intent);
 }

When the activity gets onPause() the task is being canceled. I am not sure what happens during the try/catch if a error appears, from what I’ve did, it should return null, but I think here I miss something. As I said before, randomly I get a force close even if I am on another Activity. This is really frustrating as I can’t offer a app that has this behavior. So, what am I doing wrong ?

Answer 1

You need to ask inside your AsyncTask class for isCancelled() and then decide what to do.

Check this question. It has a good explanation by Romain Guy:

You can stop an AsyncTask. If you call
cancel(true), an interrupt will be
sent to the background thread, which
may help interruptible tasks.
Otherwise, you should simply make sure
to check isCancelled() regularly in
your doInBackground() method. You can
see examples of this at
code.google.com/p/shelves.