I am starting an activity with a Serializeable extra. This extra contains a List of a custom object holding a bunch of types, mostly Strings. I read in the data from the assets folder of my project, and parse it with GSON(the data is JSON). This file is ~108KB in size.
For the life of my application, all data is being passed around as intent extras. This is very convenient as i don’t have to worry about re-loading the data from the assets folder again, app shutdown recovery is all taken care of, and i don’t need to manage an SQLite database(versioning, queries, etc).
Problem:
I find that passing these extras around can become quite slow(starting an activity with ALL the data takes maybe 1.5 seconds or more). I can’t seem to show any “loading” dialog either, as it seems to be a blocking call to start an activity and attach extras.
Question(s):
Should I avoid passing these extras around like I have described? Is the best option using an SQLite database to interact with this data? What suggestions do you have to avoid a lot of the fuss of SQLite databases/global static variables for accessing my application’s data?
Slapping my JSON data into data model classes and passing them as intent extras is easy and nice(seemingly), and i don’t want to give it up!
I had the same problem and followed the solution you already depicted. I used an SQLite DB to store the information, then passed only unique ids as intent extra and displayed a “loading…” progress dialog on the called activity while I accessed the DB.
Prolly using SQLite is the way to go.