Question

I cannot think of a proper way to wait for an object to appear. I am writing a camera app. After taking a picture, I am writing GPS Data into the exif tags. I have to wait for the location object to appear, before writing. My quick and dirty fix is to start a new thread and use a while loop to “wait” for the object:

      private static class MyRunnable implements Runnable {
         private final String imagePath;
         private final String thumbPath;
         MyRunnable(final String anImagePath, String aThumbPath) {
           this.imagePath = anImagePath;
           this.thumbPath = aThumbPath;
         }

         public void run() {
             while (mCurrentLocation == null) {
                 //do nothing
             }
             try {
             writeExifTags(imagePath);
             writeExifTags(thumbPath);
             }
             catch (NullPointerException e) {
                 Log.i(TAG, "NullPointerException");
             }
         }
      }

This works but the empty while-loop looks very ugly. I think of some kind of handler for the object but cannot think of a way to use handlers to check for the existence of mCurrentLocation. Anyone with a flash of wit? 🙂 (Yes the try/ catch block is obsolete now ^^)

Answer 1

You could try using an AsyncTask?