Question

I have an Android application that uses a Remote Service and I bind to it with bindService(), which is asynchronous.

The app is useless until the service is bound, so I would like to simply wait until the binding is finished before any Activity is started. Is there a way to have the service bound before onCreate() or onResume() is called? I think there might be a way to do the binding in Application. Any ideas?

Edit:

if in onCreate() I do this.

bindService(service, mWebServiceConnection, BIND_AUTO_CREATE);
synchronized (mLock) { mLock.wait(40000); }

The ServiceConnection.onServiceConnected doesn’t get called for 40 seconds. It’s clear that I have to let onCreate() return if I want the service to bind.

So it appears there’s no way to do what I want.

Edit 2:
Android how do I wait until a service is actually connected? has some good commentary about what is going on in Android when binding a service.

Answer 1

You cannot have bindService() block. However, your ServiceConnection (2nd parameter to bindService) has callbacks to tell you when the service is connected and disconnected, so you can have other code block until your onServiceConnected() method unblocks it.