I have an activity that has two tabs and a list view in each. I want to make loading and opening of the activities very fast. I’m worried that populating both list tabs will cause the app to lag when that acivity opens. I’m thinking of loading data from my database during the splash screen of my app and creating an array of views, then simply throwing them onto the listviews once that acivity is launched. Is this worth the effort? I can’t seem to find a simple way to do something like this. I’m assuming I will need custom array adapters. Does anyone have any experience doing somethng like this? Or would you just recommend sticking to the standard of using a cursor adapter in onCreate() ?
Share
The question what’s the reason for that you need to load them that fast. In general items can be read from a database really fast. Never the less you should do this in an AsyncTask so you won’t block the UI thread with this operation.
Another point is, if you want to display items from a database within a ListView you shouldn’t read all the item at once and put them into an array that you bind to the list. Instead you should use the Cursor you got from the database query and bind it to a SimpleCursorAdapter or CursorAdapter which you then bind to the ListView. CursorAdapters are optimized to read data from a Cursor as they are needed. Remember that creating objects is an expensive operation on Android which should be avoided if unnecessary. So if your lists a really large and the user properly won’t always scroll through the whole list then why preloading all items and creating views for it?
You can of course prequery the database during the splash screen and store the returned cursors somewhere until you need them.
But as I said at the beginning I don’t know what your application does so it is hard to say if it is worth the effort or not.