How to handle screen orientation change when progress dialog and background thread active?

Question

My program does some network activity in a background thread. Before starting, it pops up a progress dialog. The dialog is dismissed on the handler. This all works fine, exc

Answer 1

The simplest and most flexible solution is to use an AsyncTask with a static reference to ProgressBar. This provides an encapsulated and thus reusable solution to orientation change problems. This solution has served me well for varying asyncronous tasks including internet downloads, communicating with Services, and filesystem scans. The solution has been well tested on multiple android versions and phone models. A complete demo can be found here with specific interest in DownloadFile.java

I present the following as a concept example

public class SimpleAsync extends AsyncTask {
    private static ProgressDialog mProgressDialog = null;
    private final Context mContext;

    public SimpleAsync(Context context) {
        mContext = context;
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            onPreExecute();
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPreExecute() {
        mProgressDialog = new ProgressDialog( mContext );
        mProgressDialog.show();
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            mProgressDialog.dismiss();
            mProgressDialog = null;
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) {
        mProgressDialog.setProgress( progress[0] );
    }

    @Override
    protected String doInBackground(String... sUrl) {
        // Do some work here
        publishProgress(1);
        return null;
    }

    public void dismiss() {
        if ( mProgressDialog != null ) {
            mProgressDialog.dismiss();
        }
    }
}

Usage in an Android Activity is simple

public class MainActivity extends Activity {
    DemoServiceClient mClient = null;
    DownloadFile mDownloadFile = null;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate( savedInstanceState );
        setContentView( R.layout.main );
        mDownloadFile = new DownloadFile( this );

        Button downloadButton = (Button) findViewById( R.id.download_file_button );
        downloadButton.setOnClickListener( new View.OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View view) {
                mDownloadFile.execute( "http://www.textfiles.com/food/bakebred.txt");
            }
        });
    }

    @Override
    public void onPause() {
        super.onPause();
        mDownloadFile.dismiss();
    }
}