Question

I have an application where I’m setting roughly around 200 shared preferences when the application is run for the first time. I was initially loading all the preferences by calling it from my onCreate method

SharedPreferences pref = getSharedPreferences(CALC_PREFS, MODE_PRIVATE);
settingsEditor = prefs.edit();
settingsEditor.putString("Something", "");
....
settingsEditor.commit();

and it would work well and rather quickly. I then redesigned my application to have an abstract activity class to handle all the work with the shared preferences becacuse I have 4 different activities accessing these preferences.

public abstract class AnActivity extends Activity{

// Shared Preference string
private static final String CALC_PREFS = "CalculatorPrefs";
// Editor to customize preferences
private Editor settingsEditor;
// Shared preference
private SharedPreferences prefs;

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

    prefs = getSharedPreferences(CALC_PREFS, MODE_PRIVATE);
    settingsEditor = prefs.edit();
}

protected void addPref(String key, String value){
    settingsEditor.putString(key, value).commit();
}

protected void addPref(String key, int value){
    settingsEditor.putInt(key, value).commit();
}
//other methods were not posted    
}

My main activity not extends the “AnActivity” class. However, when I run my application on a fresh install or attemp to access any shared preference, it takes upwards of 10 seconds to instantiate everything.

How can I set the default values in a clean and efficient manner? Does creating an Abstract class to handle the preferences create more overhead than just calling getSharedPreferences manually?

Answer 1

Are you commiting each time you add a preference? This is probably your issue, commiting for each entry could be quite expensive, batch together your put’s and commit once.

If you don’t need to specify the default value, you could always use clear() instead

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/SharedPreferences.Editor.html#clear%28%29