Question

I have an Android app with a main tab activity, and several activities within the individual tabs. In my main activity’s onCreate(), I have a runnable that creates a list, and in the individual activities, I make use of this list.

In the individual activities’s onCreate(), I also have Runnables that operate on the list. However, I need these Runnables to only run when the main tab activity’s Runnable completes creating the list, otherwise I’d get a null list. I’m trying to find an elegant way of doing this. Right now, in my main activity’s Runnable, I’m setting a global boolean variable isDone, and in my individual activity’s Runnable, I’m waiting for isDone to be set via a while loop. This works, but probably isn’t the best way of doing so.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

Edit:
I’m trying the following code out, but I’m getting runtime errors:

In my MainActivity’s Runnable:

mainRunnable = new Runnable() {
  public void run() {
    try {
      generateList();
      synchronized(this) {
      listDone = true;
      notifyAll();
    }
  } catch (Exception e) {
      Log.e("BACKGROUND_PROC", e.getMessage());
    }
  }
};
Thread thread = new Thread(null, mainRunnable, "Background");
thread.start();

In my OtherActivity’s Runnable:

otherRunnable = new Runnable() {
  public void run() {
    synchronized(MainActivity.mainRunnable) {
      if (!MainActivity.getListDone()) {
        try {
          wait();
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
        }
      }
    }
  }
};
Thread thread = new Thread(null, otherRunnable, "Background");
thread.start();

The mainRunnable seems to run completely, but the otherRunnable seems to cause the app to crash. I get the following error message:

01-10 15:41:25.543: E/WindowManager(7074): Activity com.myapp.MainActivity has leaked window com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$DecorView@40539850 that was originally added here
01-10 15:41:25.543: E/WindowManager(7074): android.view.WindowLeaked: Activity com.myapp.MainActivity has leaked window com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$DecorView@40539850 that was originally added here

Answer 1

You can use the wait and notify methods.

To do this, there needs to be some globally accessible object whose lock isn’t used by anything else in the program at this point in time. I’m assuming that the list-creating Runnable itself can play this role.

So you could add something like this to the list-creating Runnable class:

private boolean listsDone = false;

boolean getListsDone() {
    return listsDone;
}

And something like this to its run() method, immediately after it’s done creating the lists:

synchronized (this) {
    listsDone = true;
    notifyAll();
}

And something like this to the other Runnables’ run() methods, at the point where they need to wait:

synchronized (listCreatingRunnableObject) {
    if (!listCreatingRunnableObject.getListsDone()) {
        try {
            listCreatingRunnableObject.wait();
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            // handle it somehow
        }
    }
}

Update: To clarify, both synchronized blocks need to be synchronized over the same object, and you have to call wait() and notifyAll() on that object. If the object is the Runnable, then it can be implicit for the first one (as in the above code), but if it’s the activity, you need to explicitly use the activity object in both cases.