how to send onbackground to update android studio

How to send onbackground to update android studio download#

Because of recent restrictions on Android to improve battery life, all background work including periodic tasks should now be scheduled through the JobScheduler. Services are used for repetitive and potential long running operations, checking for new data, data processing, indexing content, etc. As the service has no user interface it is not bound to the lifecycle of an activity. Import is a component which runs in the background, without direct interaction with the user.

Here’s the completed NewAppWidget.java class: import The only thing left to do is create an Intent with AppWidgetManager.ACTION_APPWIDGET_UPDATE, which is an action that informs the widget that it’s time to update, and then call this Intent in response to the user interacting with the Tap to Update TextView. We’ve already laid a lot of the groundwork by adding a Tap to Update TextView to our layout and expanding the NewAppWidget.java class to retrieve and display the current time whenever onUpdate() is called. Our widget will now update automatically once every half an hour, but what about updating in response to user interaction? If you open your project’s widget provider ( java/values/NewAppWidget.java) then you’ll see that it already contains the outline of an onUpdate() method: void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int appWidgetIds) Updating Your Widget in Response to User Action The onUpdate() method is responsible for updating your widget’s Views with new information. To make it easier to test our app, I’m going to use the smallest possible interval: android:updatePeriodMillis='1800000' Retrieving and Displaying the Current Time No-one wants to wait 24 hours just to see whether their onUpdate() method is triggering correctly, so you’ll typically use the shortest possible interval when performing initial testing, and then change this value later, if required. However, even if your widget does only need to update once per day, this isn’t ideal when testing your app. There are plenty of widgets that only update once every 24 hours, for example a widget that displays the weather forecast might only need to retrieve new information once per day. Open your project’s AppWidgetProviderInfo file ( res/xml/new_app_widget_info.xml) and you’ll see that it already defines a default update interval of 86400000 milliseconds (24 hours). You could even setup some A/B testing to check whether certain update frequencies are received more positively than others. Since how-frequent-is-too-frequent is one of those frustrating subjective questions where there’s no “right” answer, it can help to get a second opinion by arranging some user testing. To find a balance that works for your particular project, you’ll need to test your widget across a range of update frequencies and measure the impact each frequency has on battery life, while monitoring whether the widget’s content ever becomes noticeably out of date. Frequent updates are a greater drain on the device’s battery, but set these updates too far apart and your widget may wind up displaying significantly out of date information to the user. Even if you set your project's updatePeriodMillis to less than 30 minutes, you widget will still only update once every half an hour.ĭeciding how frequently your widget should update is never straightforward. When creating this kind of automatic update schedule, 1800000 milliseconds (30 minutes) is the smallest interval you can use. Since it’s the easiest method to implement, I’m going to start by updating our widget automatically, after a set period of time has elapsed. This gives us the finished layout: Updating Your Widget Based on a Schedule The looks different from your typical string, as it’s just a placeholder that’ll be replaced at runtime. Next, define the new string resources that we reference in our layout: Tap to update Add the TextView that’ll display the time of the last update// Add a TextView that’ll display our ‘Last Update’ label// While we’re working on the new_app_widget.xml file, I’m also going to add the TextView that’ll eventually allow the user to trigger an update manually: A TextView that will display the time of the last update.

A TextView that displays a Last Update label.

I’m going to add the following to the widget layout: To help us see exactly when our widget receives each update, I’m going to instruct the widget to retrieve and display the current time, whenever it performs an update. The first step is updating our layout to display some data that changes over time.

How to send onbackground to update android studio download#

We’re picking up right where we left off, so if you don’t have a copy of the widget we created in the first post, then you can download it from GitHub.

By the end of this series, we’ll have expanded our widget to retrieve and display new data automatically based on a schedule, and in response to user interaction.