Question

The docs say this for the dismiss() method from the Dialog class:

Dismiss this dialog, removing it from the screen. This method can be invoked
safely from any thread. Note that you should not override this method to do
cleanup when the dialog is dismissed, instead implement that in onStop().

In my code, all I do is call getDialog().dismiss() to dismiss it. But I am not doing anything else or even using onStop(). So I am asking exactly how to correctly dismiss a DialogFragment to avoid any memory leaks, etc..

Answer 1

tl;dr: The correct way to close a DialogFragment is to use dismiss() directly on the DialogFragment.

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Details: The documentation of DialogFragment states

Control of the dialog (deciding when to show, hide, dismiss it) should be done through the API here, not with direct calls on the dialog.

Thus, you should not use getDialog().dismiss(), since that would invoke dismiss() on the dialog. Instead, you should use the dismiss() method of the DialogFragment itself:

public void dismiss()

Dismiss the fragment and its dialog. If the fragment was added to the back stack, all back stack state up to and including this entry will be popped. Otherwise, a new transaction will be committed to remove the fragment.

As you can see, this takes care not only of closing the dialog but also of handling the fragment transactions involved in the process.

You only need to use onStop if you explicitly created any resources that require manual cleanup (closing files, closing cursors, etc.). Even then, I would override onStop of the DialogFragment rather than onStop of the underlying Dialog.