Question

I have a class for my TabActivity

public class DashboardActivity extends TabActivity

This has several tabs and an actionbar. One of these tabs is a list of items.

public class WalletActivity extends ExpandableListActivity

I want to be able to run an asynchronous task in one of the child activities, and while it is running have the spinner show in my actionbar. I already do this within an AsyncTask in my tab activity

ActionBar actionBar = (ActionBar)findViewById(R.id.actionbar);

if(actionBar != null)
    actionBar.setProgressBarVisibility(View.VISIBLE);

How can I reference the DashboardActivity that is hosting my tabbed WalletActivity?

Answer 1

I have a small method that recieves an Activity and returns the current context. If the Activity has a parent (the TabActivity, an ActivityGroup, etc), it returns that context in order to show the spinner/dialog/whatever in there.

public Context getDialogContext(Activity act) {
    Context context;
    if (act.getParent() != null) 
        context = act.getParent();
    else context = act;
        return context;
}