Question

When my application starts I need to load about 500 objects from an xml page, like this:

<object>
<name>objectname</name>
<info>info</info>
<info2>info</info2>
<info3>info</info3>
<info4>info</info4>
<alias>false</alias>
</object>

Now I want to store this on the device, hoping the reading will be faster. Currently I use an ObjectOutputStream to write the objects.

private static void write(ArrayList<MyObject> objects, String fileName, Context context) {
        final File cacheDir = context.getCacheDir();
        final File objectsFile = new File(cacheDir.getAbsoluteFile() + File.separator + fileName);

        FileOutputStream fos = null;
        ObjectOutputStream oos = null;
        boolean keep = true;

        try {
            fos = new FileOutputStream(objectsFile);
            oos = new ObjectOutputStream(fos);

            oos.writeObject(objects);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
            keep = false;
        } finally {
            try {
                if (oos != null)
                    oos.close();
                if (fos != null)
                    fos.close();
                if (keep == false)
                    objectsFile.delete();
            } catch (Exception e) {
            }
        }
    }

This is not a very fast solution, reading can take about 10-15 seconds. I’m showing the objects in a listview, so all objects need to be read in at once.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I think the best method to store such data would be in a database (see here).

Parse once and store the information in the database (one column for each attribute). It should be pretty fast to retrieve 500 records from the database 🙂