Question

I want to update a variable in my activity once every one second and for that i am using an Async task and a runnable inside it. I keep getting this error saying “Cannot refer to a non-final variable myRunnable inside an inner class defined in a different method” . When i change the declaration to final , it shows “The local variable myRunnable may not have been initialized” . How do i rectify the error? Is there a better way of doing what i want to do?

    import android.os.AsyncTask;
    import android.os.Handler;

    public class Timer extends AsyncTask<String, Process, Void>{
static int seconds=0;
TimerTask timer;
static int minutes=0;
static int hours=0;
private String timeTaken;
public Handler myhandler = new Handler();

@Override
protected Void doInBackground(String... params) {

   final Runnable myRunnable = new Runnable() {

@Override
public void run() {
    ......
......
    ...... 
myhandler.postDelayed(myRunnable, 1000);
}
};

    return null;
}   

Answer 1

How about something like this instead of using an AsyncTask (although something similar can be done within an AsyncTask, and because it runs in another thread I could simply block this worker thread using Thread.sleep(…) instead of doing the whole Runnable thing…

private myhandler = new Handler();
private boolean periodicCallsEnabled=false;

public boolean isPeriodicUpdatingEnabled(){
    return periodicCallsEnabled;
}

public void startPeriodicUpdates(){ //CALL THIS IN ORDER TO START THE PERIODIC UPDATES
    periodicCallsEnabled=true;
    periodicCall();
}

public void stopPeriodicUpdates(){ //CALL THIS TO STOP THEM
    periodicCallsEnabled=false;
    myhandler.removeCallbacksAndMessages(null);
}


void periodicCall(){
    if(periodicCallsEnabled){

        //INSERT CUSTOM CODE HERE TO BE EXECUTED EVERY SECOND
        // ......

        myhandler.postDelayed(new Runnable(){
            public void run(){
                periodicCall();
            }
        },1000);
    }
}