Android :: Best Approach To Implementing Polling
Jul 12, 2010
I am required to work on an application which is be deployed on devices running Android 1.5. The application is supposed to maintain a connection with a server and regularly poll it for new data. The server will notify the client of new data following which the client will connect to the server and download the data.I know that ideally a push based approach will be more conducive here given that we are to run this on a mobile platform. Also, from Android2.2 there is going to be support for C2DM(Cloud to Cloud device Messaging) but as already mentioned this application is for devices running Android1.5.Implementation: I was thinking of using AlarmManager which would Broadcast Intents periodically(poll interval), The Broadcast receiver will then try to connect to the remote server and make data changed check. If the server has an update, the thread will connect to the remote server and download the data from the server.
Problem and Issues: 1. Is this the right way to approach the problem? 2. Is AlarmManager reliable? Would it remember Alarms after a device boot? (I think it does) 3. How do I ensure that battery usage is kept at minimum.(I have heard something about using "keep-alive" to sustain the session for longer time..what is this legend?) 4. What are other things that I need to consider? I am sure I must be missing lots of things here.
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Jan 11, 2010
So it looks like mobile phones these days are capable of providing gps data ;) I'm building a django app with a mobile edition that I want to be location aware. My question is, how does one access GPS data? Is there a standard, or do you have to custom code for android/iphone/other. Ideally, I'd imagine it being provided in the HTTP request in the same way you get information such as the IP Address and User Agent.
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Aug 4, 2010
I intend to develop an app on android that can help people selecting the best pizza/ice cream/hot dog in a certain town based on their ratings through a poll. Now what resources do I need to achieve the desired solution? Do I need a web service or website/device connectivity for the desired poll? I would like to start off with a simple application that just shows polls or ratings for a certain item.
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Jul 11, 2010
Is it possible to do polling in Android? For example, I want my application to monitor a directory continuously. If there is for example a new folder created in that directory I want to log it down. Is it possible to acheive this by polling? Or is there any other way to do this?
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Oct 5, 2010
I have a Service that uses the LocationListener, and it will be running from boot, indefinitely. My question is, how often is too often to listen for location updates? Is 5 minutes a battery killer? What about 1?
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Nov 9, 2010
I'm trying to pulse my bluetooth dongle, to see if it is range. Every second my Android sends a char to the dongle, which then responds with a char. If there is no response, or the char is wrong, then it should conclude that there is no connection. I'm able to send from Android to dongle (attached to MCU), and the dongle is able to respond. All I need is a simple way to read each char (when received) to compare it. I'm trying to do it in a seperate thread to make it run in its own loop.
Here is my code so far, but I think I might be off, so if you could give me a pointer!
void readFromInputStream()
{
Thread readFromInputStream = new Thread()
{
public void run()...............................
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Aug 25, 2010
what I need to do is auto-register device if not already done and then start polling messages with the credentials I received through this registration. Now, after I read quite a bit about services, threads, asynctasks and the AlarmManager I'm totally confused about how to handle this. :-s So, there are my two main tasks. What would you recommend as a not-too-silly approach
1.) Registration
I'm currently spawning a service from my UI thread if there are no credentials saved in the DB. Inside this service I start an asynctask that POSTs my request to the server and receives the credentials for the new device. stopSelf ends the service.....................
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Aug 31, 2010
I working on the app where I get the data from the server using rest call and add it to the view. I get all the initial data correctly. I use AsyncTask for doing it. Now I want to periodically (say 2 mins) fetch the new data from the server and add it to view.Periodically fetching data (polling) from the server in Android.
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Sep 15, 2010
I went into Weather Bug (free version) to check the weather and accidentally hit the menu button. Decide to check preferences for the heck of it and I see "Enable Updates' set to yes and Update Interval set to every 1 hour. What?? I know it's probably not a huge drain - but I had no idea that it was checking on a regular basis (and why I don't know). So please check your apps to make sure they are not updating data auotmatically! After that I went into every app I had to make sure I was either signed out or or set updates to manual.
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Dec 23, 2009
In my application I have three buttons that are to be part of each and every activity. These button are independent of each other and on click do mutually exclusive things(say launch different activity). So, in my layout XML for every screen I have a <Linear Layout><Button/><Button/><Button/></Linear Layout> element.
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Oct 11, 2010
I'm navigating through a 3-level hierarchy of names to get to a document view page. I've set up tabs for the 3 levels. The tabs are left, middle, and right where the right tab is the lowest level of the hierarchy. Each tab has a list of 10 to 20 Radio Buttons with the names. This all works great and is very efficient and intuitive. One note is that there may be 1000 documents available (from an online source) but the average user will only be viewing a handful regularly. So I store the choices for each of the 3 tabs. This way a user can quickly navigate to his favorite without having to negotiate the entire hierarchy each time. My question comes when the user is on the right tab. At this point they have navigated through to the document they want and I'm wondering what is the best way to initiate the document view page. Remember that most of the navigation happens on the right tab in the small set of documents the user regularly visits, with only occasional visits to the other tabs. So making the right tab efficient is good. My current approach is to add a LongClickListener to the buttons of the right tab. Then a press-and-hold kicks off the document view. This certainly minimizes the number of objects on the screen and the number of separate clicks required to get to the document but I question whether new users will know that a long press is expected. I guess I could put up some Toast if the user doesn't do anything for 5 seconds but that still seems clunky. Another approach is to add a Button at the top of the right tab Radio Buttons. This has the merit of being dead obvious but it's a less efficient use of screen space and also an extra click for an experienced user.
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Jun 11, 2010
Ever since I upgraded to 2.1 my email accounts have not been polling like they are set to. In some cases, it won't poll until I manually check it. I've tried 2 factory resets, but no luck. They are set to 5 min.
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Jul 27, 2010
- Does the standard Gmail application that comes with the phone (not the email app) utilize polling on a set schedule, or is it set to automatically push messages to the phone as soon as they hit the Gmail server? I have noticed that what it does seems to correspond to my Google Account Settings (and what I have checked). Specifically, when I check off the "Sync Gmail" feature, I seem to get my Gmail emails on my phone in real time. Does this mean that checking this option allows Gmail to "push" emails to my phone, or is it simply polling at very frequent intervals?
- Which, in your experience, uses less battery: setting the phone to poll for e-mails every 30-60 minutes, or simply having the server "push" the e-mails straight to the phone? Also, does "pushing" e-mails work when Syncing is turned off (via the Power Control widget)
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Nov 24, 2010
I am looking to create an Android application that uses Tabs.
Requirements
- When a user selects a tab and gets back to the same tab, there shouldn't be a loading period (preferably).
- Each tab will contain a listview.
- In one of the tabs, I will have to use subtabs. And that's it.
One great example I really liked (although I didn't try the app) is
http://www.usatoday.com/android/.
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Dec 11, 2009
Is there a way to change how often the device updates my email? I had a sprint Hero and switched to the moment (very good decision), and I changed it on the Hero to improve battery life.
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Aug 30, 2010
I have a general Android design question around data access. I have a number of activities in my application that need to access a SQLite database. In order to wrap up all data access logic in one place I have created a DatbaseHandler class that takes care of all data access logic. This class takes care of building up where clauses, calling the database and interrogating the resulting cursor to retrieve the query results and return them to the caller. The purpose of this class is to wrap all data access code in one place so that it can be easily managed and maintained as opposed to having data access logic scattered across all activities. Each activity that needs access to the database creates an instance of this DatabaseHandler class and passes it a reference of android.content.Context. The DatabaseHandler class then uses this Context object to call an underlying content provider as follows context_i.getContentResolver().query(...).
My data access logic (cursor handling logic to be specific) is not in the activity and so I cannot manage the cursors life cycle, therefore there is likely to be memory leaks.
My questions are as follows -
How can I (if its even possible) manage the cursors life cycle from outside an Activity? Should each activity even be creating an instance of this data handler class and passing an instance of Context to it? Perhaps my design approach is wrong and I should expose these data access functions as static methods that take an instance of the calling activity as a parameter. That way I could perform managed queries and let the activity take care of managing the cursors life cycle?
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Dec 29, 2009
I'm trying to animate object. I use keyframe animation: I have two vertex buffers (two frames) with vertices of my object - first buffer is for object start state and second for end state. To transform the object I simply use linear interpolation. To make it more clear, please take a look at the code snippet:
CODE:..................
As you can see I actually use one more buffer. vertexBuffer_motion is the one I use to draw my object in intermediate state.
Time for my question. What is the best approach for such keyframe animation on android? Can I somehow avoid (quite time consuming) operations of calculating and copying new state of all vertices to vertexBuffer_motion?
I know I could use VBO but still, I would have to prepare this vertexBuffer_motion and use glBufferData to set data to this VBO (or not?). provide me with some code example showing the best approach for keyframe animation on android?
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May 8, 2010
I've recently knocked up a server/client app for Windows & Android that allows one to send a file from Windows to an android phone over a socket connection. It works great for a single file but trying to send multiple files over in a single stream is causing me problems. I've also realised that aside from the binary data, I will need to send messages over the socket to indicate error states and other application messages. I have little experience with network programming and and wondering what is the best way forward.Basically the C# server side of the app just goes into a listening state and uses Socket.SendFile to transmit the file. On Android I use the standard Java Socket.getInputStream() to receive the file. That works great for a single file transfer, but how should I handle multiple files and error/messaging information? Do I need to use a different socket for each file? Should I be using a higher level framework to handle this or can I send everything over the single socket? Any other suggestions for frameworks or learning materials?
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Jul 29, 2010
I'm working on an app that is meant to be used by fans of a sport team. In the future, I expect to use the same app but for any different team. So, what changes would be the colors, team logo, app name and the like. So, is there any technique that allows me to build binaries for different teams without having duplicated resources?
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Aug 18, 2010
I used Eclipse with the Android SDK to develop the original application. I ask since this was my first Java (and Eclipse, and Android, and XML) project. I assume that most of the Java should run on the PC without too much trouble. I may want to restructure the code to isolate the Android specific functions. Should I stay with Eclipse or move to something like NetBeans?
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Nov 23, 2010
In my Android application, it is noticed that when the device goes to sleep/standby WiFi is disconnected. When the device wakes up, it gets reconnected. Before making a httpClient.execute(..) call to remote server we check if the device is connected to n/w. When the data transfer is being done and if the device goes to sleep then Android runtime will switch to another medium for connectivity(3G,GPRS etc.)
Is the switch from WiFi to alternate cellular service say 3G, seamless? How do I wait for WiFi to become available again? Should I use Thread.sleep(delay) when the WiFi wakes up? I have seen broadcast actions when the WiFi state changes. In general, what is the ideal approach to handling WiFi disconnects in a mobile app?
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Jul 23, 2010
For my first application, the only testing I've really done to this point is on my Droid X. I want to think through the various hardware differences and come up with a testing plan that is representative of the Android landscape. My initial thought is to create a list of emulators that have unique qualities such as screen size and SDK levels. I've noticed very quickly how the UI of my application will need some adjustment when viewed on devices that don't carry a 4.3" screen. How have you approached this hurdle in your own development? Chris Stewart cstewart...@gmail.com http://www.androidsdkforum.com *Want to advertise your Android application for free? Email me for details!*
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Nov 2, 2009
I'm a total newbie to Android (and to Java in general... mostly a PERL/ PHP guy here...), so forgive me if I use the wrong terminology to refer to things... I have been asked by my company to implement an application for Android that allows a user to enter a note at the end of every call. E.g., either they or the other party hangs up, immediately a notes area pops up with a "save" button and if they enter a note, the note is saved with a reference to the call log entry. As I understand it, onCallStateChange() will give a pretty good indicator of a hangup if the state has become Telephony Manager.CALL_STATE_IDLE. I've figured out how to do the UI part, how to save it in a database, etc... My question, however, is about how I implement this "listening" aspect of it. Should I have a service running all the time that has an instance of android.telephony.PhoneStateListener? If so, do I use the onBind or onStart method, and how do I make sure it doesn't go away when memory runs low? Or can I somehow attach the listener to this event, and then terminate? Or is a Broadcast Receiver the way to go?
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May 7, 2010
I plan to implement an alternative sortable list of images but I do not know how to approach the function of the layout. The plan is to make it look like the playstation 3 media bar. One example of use for this sortable list could be a result set from search for cars. On the x-axis there is model year and on the y-axis there are images of cars that year. BUT I only want the car highlighted that is in the cross of the x and y-axis, all other area grayed out in some way. You are able to navigate through this list in all directions. Make sense?
I would like to know where to start to accomplish this. My first approach was to implement a gridview but I only manage to make it scrollable in one direction.
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Dec 19, 2009
for those of you running moxier mail on exchange with a polling mode, have you ever noticed it doesn't successfully always update? I am seeing that at times i will set it to a 1 hour polling mode for example but it won't bring down new emails. If i notice on the moxier settings page the last synch'd time is further back than the polling interval i'll hit 'synch now' and it ALWAYS brings down any new messages.
I contacted moxier and they seem to think its an issue with my server. I should also say my IT department doesn't support moxier/android explicitly but there is no reason it shouldn't work as designed they say. I have dug into the moxier logs and it seems that everytime i see a failure the following similar entries appear to be in the logs:.............
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Nov 27, 2009
I am really excited to share with you guys that I have solved my horrible battery life problem, at least to a satisfactory degree. Without further ado, I present to you How I Doubled My Android Phone's (HTC Hero) Battery Life or Just How Much Email Polling Affects Your Battery
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Sep 28, 2010
I have an app in which there are several requests to a server in internet (http), for example to retrieve images in threads outside the main UI process. The thing is that I have a Thread that manage the request with a while(!end) loop and in the end a Thread.sleep(500) that checks if there are new unhandled requests. As I read here [1] I know that this is not a good practice. And users have complain about ANR (app not responding) in several cases.
Knowing that obviously I want to refactor all the way my app manage the requests and I want to do that the best way. So, the question is; what is the best approach for doing this? A service? a broadcast receiver and send intents when I need a request to be handled?
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May 6, 2010
My wish is to know how I can program a mobile website, that fit to all mobile phones.
Are there any special approaches to recognize a device and render the code according to it?
Which tools and coding languages are required?
My first thought was to hold the website in XML, which would be parsed depending on the device.
You have to consider old phones, even devices with only wap support.
For example: The mobile website has to recognize Nokia N75 and render/send the code that looks optimal for this device. Same thing with an iPhone or a Motorola Razr.
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Sep 23, 2010
I am developing an app for android mobiles that communicates with a json/rest web service. I need to make certain kinds of calls periodically to the server to check for some information. Within that context I might need also to query the GPS for the current position. I'm quite undecided to use a Local Service, since I don't know very well how to deal with them, in fact I need to retrieve those data periodically and refresh a MapView accordingly. I heard that I can use PendingIntents,in the service, associate this data as a payload and send them to a broadcast receiver which unpack the data and refresh the UI, I heard also that this is a bad design approach because of what broadcast receiver are intended to be used for.
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Jun 22, 2009
I have tried to understand for the past 2 days what is the best approach to making the value from a variable sitting in activity A (in my case, the int position used in OnListItemClick / OnItemSelectedListener) available in another activity B (which of course sits in another class). There may be the option to write the result of the OnListItemClick int position into a small SQLite DB - but that seems to be total overkill.
Anybody could pls share the best approach with me?
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