Working with onPause, onRestart, in Tab Widget - Android

Question

I have a ListView that is inside a TabWidget. When I select an item on the ListView and go to the child ListView, the TabWidget disappears. This is fine, except that it invokes the onPause method, and thus causes onRestart to be called when I return to the parent ListView.

I have onRestart setup to retrieve updated data from the server, but I do not want this to occur everytime the user returns to the parent ListView. I only want onRestart to be called when the app comes alive from running in the background. I have tried implementing a Boolean variable to determine if I should execute the code that is inside onRestart, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get around the effects of this.

Ideas?

Answer 1

You could fire off your child activity with startActivityForResult and set a flag in onActivityResult to not reload (which should be called when the user backs into the listview from the detail page). You'd have a member variable (let's say mReload) that you'd set to true in onCreate and onRestart, and to false in onActivityResult, then process the reload onResume if mReload is true (and set it back to false so a normal resume won't trigger the reload).

Alternative: just set a flag (mLeftPage) in your activity on the row's click listener. On restart, if mLeftPage is true, don't reload the list and set mLeftPage back to false. Otherwise, reload.