Question

I have a loading screen, I want to display the loadingMessage1 for 3 secs than shows loading message 2. I only want loading message 2 to appear once, but when I tried to do it, loading message 2 kept getting appended in an endless loop.

So i tried put a count variable to increases after every loading message 2 append, but it doesnt work. where am i going wrong, is there another solution to this?

final TextView loadingMessage1 = (TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.loadingMessage1);
int count = 0;
final Handler handler = new Handler();

if (count == 0){
    handler.post(new Runnable(){    
            @Override
            public void run(){
                loadingMessage1.append("Loading Message 2");
                handler.postDelayed(this, 3*1000L);
            }   
    }); 
    count++;
}

Answer 1

You are making a mistake on the following line:

handler.postDelayed(this, 3*1000L);

Here you send to this Runnable object to the handler while handling this. That means when you fist execute the Runnable, on the end you add it again to the handler’s message loop. Thus you obtained an infinite loop. Something of the like will solve your problem:

final TextView loadingMessage1 = (TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.loadingMessage1);
int count = 0;
final Handler handler = new Handler();

handler.postDelayed(new Runnable(){    
        @Override
        public void run(){
            loadingMessage1.append("Loading Message 2");
        }   
}, 3*1000L); 

EDIT:

To make all this stuff flexible, do the following:

// inner class
class TextChanger implements Runnable {
    private final String message;

    public TextChanger(String message) {
        this.message = message;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        loadingMessage1.append(message);
    }

}

and then somewhere in your code:

public static final long TIME_CONSTANT = 3*1000L;

final TextView loadingMessage1 = (TextView)this.findViewById(R.id.loadingMessage1);
int count = 0;
final Handler handler = new Handler();

handler.postDelayed(new TextChanger("Whatever 1"), TIME_CONSTANT);
handler.postDelayed(new TextChanger("Whatever 2"), 2 * TIME_CONSTANT);

and so on. The trick is not to reference this as you did before, because it creates an infinite loop.