Question

I have 2 activities and I’m trying to send from Activity A to Activity B some huge objects that implements Serializable. The problem is the time taken by Android OS to serializate this objets. Is there any way to send parameters between Activities? I tryed sending to Application object and getting it in the next activity but I think this way is dirty…

Answer 1

Here are some alternate ideas you could use instead of passing huge amount of data by Serializable or Parcelable:

• If you use this big chunk of data often you might consider using a Service. It would hold the data, process it and deliver when needed. Afterwards it can be terminated.
• Another approach would be to put a reference to this big object in Application object (like this). “Global reference” doesn’t usually sound good, but this is recommended in some cases. Even further, if you still find it “dirty” you can use WeakReference and get rid of it as soon as it’s passed to second Activity and used by it.
• Or, yet another way, you could consider doing all the work in singular Activity (without starting the second one) and just play with Views. If it’s possible for you of course.