Landscape Progress Madness !!!
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: View not attached to window manager
This was the first and only error reported for our android client for cinemaat.com which now has over 500 downloads. I scratch my head looking at the stack trace trying to reproduce the bug! The exception is thrown at a line that dismisses the progress dialog indicating that movie data was loaded and the application is ready to be used. No matter how absurd scenarios I try the application is resilient, nothing breaks!! Finally, I was reading about the emulator I tried flipping the phone (Ctrl+F12), ok the UI wasn’t designed to work on landscape so it looked ugly!! I tried doing this a couple of times and finally I can tell when this happens, It happens when you flip the screen while there is a dialog in progress. Ok so the solution came easy for me, the application wasn’t designed for landscape mode any way so I just disabled that. You can do this by editing your AndroidManifest.xml and slapping a:
android:screenOrientation=”portrait”
on the activities you want to disable the mode on.
However, I started thinking, what if I wanted to keep my landscape mode and avoid this bug, so I created a test project to do this and reached the following conclusion:
- Have a flag to mark loading complete instead of checking on a dialog reference.
- override the onSaveInstanceState() method and have it dismiss the dialog if it exists.
- In the onCreate() always check for the flag and not for the dialog reference.
There is another method that I am yet to try but should work theoretically, registering your activity to listen on configChanges orientation should alter the lifecycle of your activity and remove the destroy-create behavior and instead invoke the onConfigurationChanged() method. I am yet to try this though, will do so then update the post one day.
