Question

I’m in the process of setting up a background task that makes network calls; however, my development has stalled as a result of the fact that I am unable to get my AsyncTask that I have set up to work, what I did was I placed toasts at various points in the code to see where the problem was occurring. I realized that I would get a toasts at all points right up to the pre execute method of the AsyncTask; however, in the doInBackground and postexecute, I would get nothing.

Why is this? and if this can’t be done what is the work around?

package com.testapp2.second.activities;

import java.util.Date;

import com.testapp2.second.OTweetApplication;
import twitter4j.Twitter;
import twitter4j.TwitterException;
import twitter4j.User;
import android.app.NotificationManager;
import android.app.Service;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.AsyncTask;
import android.os.IBinder;
import android.widget.Toast;

public class StatsCheckerService extends Service {
    private OTweetApplication app;
    private Twitter twitter;
    User user;

    @Override
    public IBinder onBind(Intent arg0) {
       return null;
    }

    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
       super.onCreate();
       app = (OTweetApplication) getApplication();
       twitter = app.getTwitter();

       Toast.makeText(this, "My Service Created", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

    }

    @Override
    public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
        if (app.isAuthorized()) {

            Toast.makeText(this, "My Service Started", Toast.LENGTH_LONG)
                .show();
            new toastTwitterInBg();
        }
        return START_STICKY;

    }

    @Override
    public void onDestroy() {
        super.onDestroy();
        Toast.makeText(this, "My Service Stopped", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    }

    private class toastTwitterInBg extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, User> {

        @Override
        protected User doInBackground(Void... arg0) {
            try {
                user = twitter.verifyCredentials();
                Toast.makeText(StatsCheckerService.this, "async tasks do in background", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
            } catch (TwitterException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            return user;
        }

        @Override
        protected void onPostExecute(User result) {
            // TODO Auto-generated method stub
            super.onPostExecute(result);
            Toast.makeText(StatsCheckerService.this, "async tasks on post execute finished", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
        }

    }
} 

Answer 1

As someone else already pointed out, toasts will not work in doInBackground as that runs on a separate thread. Also, are you actually executing your AsyncTask?

Shouldn’t this be:

@Override
public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
  // ....
  new toastTwitterInBg().execute();
  // ....
}

Note the .execute().