Question

I have a tab widget where one of the tabs is a chat-type feature. I want to update the chat data at an interval (variable depending on whether the chat tab is active or not).

The best approach seemed to be using an AsyncTask in my main TabActivity class, as that would avoid any issues of the chat activity being destroyed while in the background, while an AsyncTask was running. I wanted to ensure that the Activity isn’t destroyed and recreated, thus causing my AsyncTask to be unable to modify the actual active Activity’s data.

However, now that my AsyncTask is in the TabActivity activity, I don’t have a direct way to call my Chat’s ListAdapter notifyDataSetChanged() from my onPostExecute() method anymore. Is there a way to get a reference to a given Tab’s current Activity from the TabHost/TabActivity?

Or, alternatively, can I assume my chat activity will never be destroyed as a child activity of the TabActivity activity (well, never destroyed while the TabActivity is active at least), and then just put the AsyncTask in the Chat Activity?

Answer 1

Really the best way to do this is to have a thread that runs and periodically gets the chat data. Then from your UI you can poll the thread to get new messages. This way you can have the thread running no matter what happens to the Activity.