Async Task Example

We import the classes and modules needed by our application. The most relevant to this example is the AsyncTask class which enables background processing to be initiated by the main thread.

from java.lang import Integer, Object, String
from android.app import Activity
from android.os import AsyncTask, Bundle
from android.view import View
from android.widget import TextView

We define a class based on the standard Activity class. This represents the application, and will be used to present a graphical interface to the user.

class AsyncTaskActivity(Activity):

    __interfaces__ = [View.OnClickListener]

The class declares that it implements the View.OnClickListener interface by including it the __interfaces__ attribute. This requires that we implement the onClick method.

The initialisation method simply calls the corresponding base class method to properly initialise the activity.

    def __init__(self):
    
        Activity.__init__(self)

Similarly, the onCreate method calls the onCreate method of the base class to help set up the activity. We create a TextView and register the activity as the listener for it so that we can handle clicks on it in the onClick method.

    @args(void, [Bundle])
    def onCreate(self, bundle):
    
        Activity.onCreate(self, bundle)
        
        self.view = TextView(self)
        self.view.setOnClickListener(self)
        self.view.setText("Click me!")
        
        self.setContentView(self.view)

The onClick method is called when the user clicks on the TextView. We create an custom Task instance, passing the TextView instance to it for later use, and we call its execute method, passing an array of Objects for processing.

    @args(void, [View])
    def onClick(self, view):
    
        l = array([1, 2, 3])
        self.task = Task(self.view)
        self.task.execute(l)

We define a Task class based on the standard AsyncTask class. This encapsulates the processing that we want to perform in the background. The equivalent Java class is a template class with the following parameters: Params, Progress and Result.

class Task(AsyncTask):

    __item_types__ = [int, int, String]

The __item_types__ attribute defines the types of the three parameters defining our specialisation of the AsyncTask class: Params, Progress and Result.

The initialisation method accepts the TextView object that we want to update, storing it for later reference, and calls the base class method.

    @args(void, [TextView])
    def __init__(self, view):
    
        AsyncTask.__init__(self)
        self.view = view

We define the doInBackground method with the code we want to be executed in the background. The method is called with an array of parameters of the first type declared in the __item_types__ attribute and we return a value of the third type in the __item_types__ attribute. In this example, we simply concatenate string representations of the integers in the list supplied and return the resulting string.

    @args(Result, [[Params]])
    def doInBackground(self, params):
    
        s = ""
        i = 0
        while i < len(params):
            s += str(params[i]) + "\n"
            i += 1
        
        return s

The onPostExecute method is called with the value we returned from the previous method. This lets us decide how the result of the processing is used. Here, we display the string we created in the previous method in the TextView instance that we passed to the Task instance on its creation.

    @args(void, [Result])
    def onPostExecute(self, result):
    
        self.view.setText(result)

Async Task Example

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