Question

When I change device orientation, if AlertDialog was shown, it disappears. This is true for all but one dialogs in my app, and I can’t figure out neither what’s so special about the one that doesn’t disappear nor how to counteract this behaviour. Any possibility to preserve dialogs upon orientation change (except for manual management)?

Answer 1

As suggested by many people here,

android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation"

is not a solution. It’s a hack at best. The correct way to handle this is to manage dialogs through your activity. You need to override a few methods in your activity code, Like so:

protected Dialog onCreateDialog(int id) {
    // create and return your dialog instance here
    AlertDialog dialog = new AlertDialog.Builder(context)
        .setTitle(title)
        .setIcon(R.drawable.indicator_input_error)
        .setMessage(message)
        .create();
    dialog.setButton(
            DialogInterface.BUTTON_POSITIVE,    
            context.getString(R.string.OK),
            (DialogInterface.OnClickListener) null);
    return dialog;
}

protected void onPrepareDialog(int id, Dialog dialog) {
    // You dialog initialization code here
}

After you’re done with this. You show your dialog using:

showDialog(yourDialogID);

Once you’re done implementing this, your’ll see that your dialog will also be recreated if configuration changes occur. The best part is that your Activity will manage your dialog for you. It will be reused when possible, reducing dialog load times if you perform heavy initialization.

Note from Android SDK documentation:
Using this attribute should be avoided and used only as a last-resort. Please read Handling Runtime Changes for more information about how to properly handle a restart due to a configuration change.