Pro Android 5, Fifth Edition

Chapter    15

Advanced AsyncTask and Progress Dialogs

In Chapter 13, we covered handlers and worker threads to run long-running tasks while the main thread kept the UI house in order. Android SDK has recognized this as a pattern and abstracted the handler and thread details into a utility class called AsyncTask. You can use AsyncTask to run tasks that take longer than five seconds in the context of UI. (We will cover how to run really long-running tasks, ranging from minutes to even hours, through “Long-Running Receivers and Services” in Chapter 16.)

This chapter will start with the basics of an AsyncTask and move to the code needed to present progress dialogs and progress bars that show the status of an AsyncTask correctly even if the device ...