Question

I have an AsyncTask with an indeterminate ProgressBar that typically executes very quickly, but occasionally slowly. It’s undesirable and distracting to for the the progress bar to flash quickly when there is no discernible wait.

Is there a way to delay display of the progress bar without creating another nested AsyncTask?

Answer 1

Thanks to Code Droid, I was able to write an abstract AsyncTask class that shows an indeterminate progress bar after a specified delay. Just extend this class instead of AsyncTask and be sure to call super() when appropriate:

public abstract class AsyncTaskWithDelayedIndeterminateProgress
      <Params, Progress, Result> extends AsyncTask<Params, Progress, Result> {
   private static final int MIN_DELAY = 250;
   private final ProgressDialog progressDialog;
   private final CountDownTimer countDownTimer;

   protected AsyncTaskWithDelayedIndeterminateProgress(Activity activity) {
      progressDialog = createProgressDialog(activity);
      countDownTimer = createCountDownTimer();
   }

   @Override protected void onPreExecute() {
      countDownTimer.start();
   }

   @Override protected void onPostExecute(Result children) {
      countDownTimer.cancel();
      if(progressDialog.isShowing())
         progressDialog.dismiss();
   }

   private ProgressDialog createProgressDialog(Activity activity) {
      final ProgressDialog progressDialog = new ProgressDialog(activity);
      progressDialog.setIndeterminate(true);
      return progressDialog;
   }

   private CountDownTimer createCountDownTimer() {
      return new CountDownTimer(MIN_DELAY, MIN_DELAY + 1) {
         @Override public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished) { }

         @Override public void onFinish() {
            progressDialog.show();
         }
      };
   }