Question

I’m making Android Jabber chat client for school’s work.

Everything works okay so far. But when I change the phone’s orientation it will re-connect to server.

It only took 3-5 seconds to re-connect, but during that time if I send a message, it will cause NullPointerException which is the XMPPConnection variable.

By googling, I found that I can use onRetainNonConfigurationInstance but my ChatClient class extends Fragment and it’s not available.

My target is 4.0.3+ so I don’t need to worry about compatibility support or such.

Any solution except using static variable?

Thanks

Answer 1

I am not sure that hosting your xmppconnection inside the fragment is a good idea.

A common approach would be to host it inside a service so your connection can persist even if the application is in background (and in any case does not depend on your activity / fragment recreation), or, if you are not interested in having it connected when your app is in background, another good option would be to have the xmppconnection hosted inside a singleton object.

If, on the other hand, this is a school project and all you want is the fragment persist along configuration changes such as rotation, you can use
setRetainInstance method:

Control whether a fragment instance is retained across Activity re-creation (such as from a configuration change). This can only be used with fragments not in the back stack.