Question

I have an AsyncTask which does a lot of JSON calculations.

public class InitializationTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, InitializationResult> {
    private ProcessController processController = new ProcessController();
    private ProgressDialog progressDialog;
    private MainActivity mainActivity;

    public InitializationTask(MainActivity mainActivity) {
        this.mainActivity = mainActivity;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        super.onPreExecute();

        progressDialog = new ProgressDialog(mainActivity);
        progressDialog.setMessage("Die Daten werden aufbereitet.\nBitte warten...");
        progressDialog.setIndeterminate(true); //means that the "loading amount" is not measured.
        progressDialog.setCancelable(false);
        progressDialog.show();
    };

    @Override
    protected InitializationResult doInBackground(Void... params) {
        return processController.initializeData();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(InitializationResult result) {
        super.onPostExecute(result);

        progressDialog.dismiss();

        if (result.isValid())  {
            mainActivity.finalizeSetup();
        }
        else  {
            AlertDialog.Builder dialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(mainActivity);
            dialog.setTitle("Initialisierungsfehler");
            dialog.setMessage(result.getReason());
            dialog.setPositiveButton("Ok",
                    new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {

                        @Override
                        public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int which) {
                            dialog.cancel();

                            mainActivity.finish();
                        }
                    });

            dialog.show();
        }
    }
}

processController.initializeData() runs for about 20 seconds. All this works. It even works when I install the application, and pressing home button while application is initializing. The AsyncTask is working in the background. When I restart the application from Android device again after the AsyncTask has been finished, the application still works.
But the application cannot handle this use case: When I deploy the application (or start it when no data is initialized), so that it really takes about 20sec to initialize the data and when I hit home to close the application while initialization (the AsyncTask) runs in the background and start the application again, it leads to unexpected behavior as RuntimExceptions and so on. It seems that the device wants to load the application twice, but none of them can start successfully. How to deal with that?
I thought about checking if there is a running AsyncTask in MainActivity to avoid starting it again:

private InitializationTask initializationTask = new InitializationTask(this);

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);

    if (!AsyncTask.Status.RUNNING.equals(initializationTask.getStatus()))  {
        initializationTask.execute((Void[])null);
    }

    initializeMap();
}

Unfortunately this does do nothing. Moreover I’m not sure if such use case is possible at all, because when I start the same application twice, they cannot “share” an AsyncTask. Should I somehow avoid starting the application twice or something? I’m not sure what options do I have on this? Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found the solution: It’s actually not an AsyncTask issue. The problem was that my parse method of JSONParser (that does the most of the work) which is invoked in processController.initializeData(), was not synchronized.