What to do on TransactionTooLargeException

Question

I got a TransactionTooLargeException. Not reproducible. In the docs it says

The Binder transaction failed because it was too large.

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Answer 1

This was happening in my app because I was passing a list of search results in a fragment's arguments, assigning that list to a property of the fragment - which is actually a reference to the same location in memory pointed to by the fragment's arguments - then adding new items to the list, which also changed the size of the fragment's arguments. When the activity is suspended, the base fragment class tries to save the fragment's arguments in onSaveInstanceState, which crashes if the arguments are larger than 1MB. For example:

private ArrayList mSearchResults;

@Override
public void onActivityCreated(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState);

    if (getArguments() != null && getArguments().getSerializable("SearchResults") != null) {
        mSearchResults = (ArrayList) getArguments().getSerializable("SearchResults");
    }
}

private void onSearchResultsObtained(ArrayList pSearchResults) {

    // Because mSearchResults points to the same location in memory as the fragment's arguments
    // this will also increase the size of the arguments!
    mSearchResults.addAll(pSearchResults);
}

The easiest solution in this case was to assign a copy of the list to the fragment's property instead of assigning a reference:

@Override
public void onActivityCreated(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onActivityCreated(savedInstanceState);

    if (getArguments() != null && getArguments().getSerializable("SearchResults") != null) {

        // Copy value of array instead of reference
        mSearchResults = new ArrayList((ArrayList) getArguments().getSerializable("SearchResults"));
    }
}

An even better solution would be to not pass around so much data in the arguments.

I probably never would have found this without the help of this answer and TooLargeTool.