What is lifecycle observer and how to use it correctly?

Question

I have read about new architectural components in Android. So, i wanted to ask what are lifecycle observers and why do we need them? In what cases it is useful? Thanks for your answer!

Solution 1

You can use ProcessLifecycleOwner to get your Application's LifeCycle and to add a class as an observer of these events. You can implement LifecycleObserver in your Application Class:

public class MyApplication extends MultiDexApplication implements LifecycleObserver

@Override
public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();

    ProcessLifecycleOwner.get().getLifecycle().addObserver(this);

}

// Add these Lifecycle methods to observe when your app goes into the background or to the foreground:

@OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_RESUME)
public void appInResumeState() {
    Toast.makeText(this,"In Foreground",Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}

@OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_PAUSE)
public void appInPauseState() {
    Toast.makeText(this,"In Background",Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
}

// Add the following in your build.gradle file

implementation 'android.arch.lifecycle:extensions:1.1.1'

//Also In Activities or Fragments

You can also use them to reduce the complexity of code by creating different components which are implementing LifecycleObserver and then pass the lifecycle of activity to these components. This way you can split up the huge complexity to different components.

class MainActivity : AppCompatActivity(), LifecycleObserver {

    override fun onCreate(savedInstanceState: Bundle?) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState)
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_main)
        ReduceComplexComponent().registerLifecycle(lifecycle)

    }

}

class ReduceComplexComponent : LifecycleObserver{

    registerLifecycle(lifecycle : Lifecycle){
       lifecycle.addObserver(this)
    }

    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_RESUME)
    fun resume() {
       Log.d("OnResume","ON_RESUME")
    }

    @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_PAUSE)
    fun pause() {
       Log.d("onPause","ON_PAUSE")
    }
}

This way you can listen to activity or fragment lifecycle events in separate components.

We can also manually fetch the current state of our lifecycle instance in Activity and that we can do by using its getCurrentState()

A State also has an isAtLeast() method that we can use to perform comparisons against the current lifecycle state

Solution 2

May be a little late to the party, but another nice use-case of lifecycles (except for the obvious ViewModel stuff), is to let many components of the app un-register themselves when the relevant activity is getting destroyed, or simply out of screen.

For example, I have a static factory that creates dialogs, and using lifecycle I can dismiss the dialogs without cluttering the host activity with the old stuff like Dialog mDialog = ... and void onPause(){ ... if (mDialog !null && mDialog.isShowing()) mDialog.cancel() }

Some code:

DialogUtils.java:

public static void showConfirmDialog(Lifecycle lifecycle, String title, String msg, Runnable okRunnable) {
    AlertDialog dialog = AlertDialog.Builder(mAppContext)
    /* configuration stuff ... */
        .build();

    dialog.show();

    lifecycle.addObserver(new LifecycleObserver() {
          @OnLifecycleEvent(Lifecycle.Event.ON_PAUSE)
          public void cancelDialog() {
            if (dialog.isShowing()) { // if not already dismissed by main-button tap 
              dialog.cancel();
            }
          }
    });
}

MyActivity.java:

public class MyActivity extends AppCompatActivity {

    /* stuff... onCreate()... other stuff... */

    private void confirmDeleteUser(User user){
        DialogUtils.showConfirmDialog(
            MyActivity.this.getLifecycle(), // all activities & fragment have lifecycles
            "Confirm Delete",
            "Action cannot be undone. Sure to continue?",
            new Runnable() { /* stuff... */ }
        );
        // Voilà! 
        // activity no needs to store reference to the dialog and cancel manually on pause
        // it's a fire-and-forget action
    }
}

Solution 3

lifecycle-extensions API have been deprecated.

lifecycle-extensions Artifact Deprecation: With the above deprecation of ViewModelProviders.of(), this release marks the deprecation of the last API in lifecycle-extensions and this artifact should now be considered deprecated in its entirety. We strongly recommend depending on the specific Lifecycle artifacts you need (such as lifecycle-service if you’re using LifecycleService and lifecycle-process if you’re using ProcessLifecycleOwner) rather than lifecycle-extensions as there will not be a future 2.3.0 release of lifecycle-extensions.

If you want to continue to use ProcessLifecycleOwner, it is recommended to add this dependency:

implementation "androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-process:2.2.0"

Ref:
https://developer.android.com/jetpack/androidx/releases/lifecycle#version_220_3

https://androidx.tech/artifacts/lifecycle/lifecycle-extensions/

https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/lifecycle/ProcessLifecycleOwner

Solution 4

LifeCycleObserver is part of Google released Android Jetpack LifeCycle Architecture components, and it is an interface that allows you to observe a LifeCycle-aware observable component, typically a LifeCycleOwner (Activity/Fragment), in order to interact with the LifeCycle events and states associated to this component; so you can monitor foreground and background lifeCycle events.

Here are some useful links with typical usage

• https://developer.android.com/reference/android/arch/lifecycle/Lifecycle.html
• https://medium.com/@MinaSamy/android-architecture-components-lifecycle-433ace1ec05d
• https://riggaroo.co.za/android-architecture-components-looking-lifecycles-part-3/
• https://proandroiddev.com/make-your-custom-view-lifecycle-aware-its-a-piece-of-cake-90b7c0498686

Solution 5

You use them in order to reduce the callbacks and clean-ups of components due to Lifecycle events of your app. For instance you have a Handler/Runnable that is running from a Thread somewhere and you need to have some callbacks/interfaces in order to stop and remove the listener when onStop() is called; thus using the new "Jetpack LifeCycle Architecture components" you can make your component/class "lifecycle-aware" hence controlling it easily from the Activity/Fragment using it!

More info as stated above: https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/lifecycle

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