[android-developers] Starting with Loaders, Beginner Questions

Hey guys,

I'm beginning to bring my application out of the dark ages (API 7) up to the more recent stuff and I'd like to migrate from my current Singleton data provider to something like the Loader paradigm. I had a couple of question. Currently, when the Application starts, I pull all of my objects out of the database and hold them in a singleton User object on the Application. The Activities then pass around ID references which query the singleton for values. This breaks down rather dramatically when the application is terminated and doesn't really jive well with "the Android way." I've started to do some testing with loaders and have based my test implementation off the follow tutorial:

http://www.androiddesignpatterns.com/2012/08/implementing-loaders.html

Couple Questions:

1. Are loaders special? Are they handled differently from a LifeCycle perspective or is it simply a more streamlined way of doing loading in an AsyncTask then returning it to the Activity?

2. There always seems to be a nasty flash of an empty list on my Activities. Should the onResume check for a load and load immediately? (deliverResults?)

3. Do the loaders save state in an onSaveInstanceState sort of way?

4. I'm a little foggy on the ContentObserver. My data is backed up by the SQLlite DB... is a ContentObserver "better", or should I just manually invoke BroadcastReceivers when my application pulls down new data?

5. How should I handle loading animations in the Activity? Traditional way of start/stopping the "Loading" animation? My question is around when... show ProgressBar in onResume and hide it on onLoadFinished?

Thanks for any pointers!

E

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