How to schedule a background task
android
Solution
I use an alarmmanager to schedule an intent matching a broadcastreceiver. in the onRecieve method i start a service (startService), which spawns an AsyncTask. The task fetches data and stores it and then stopSelf() the service.
I'd suggest using an `IntentService` instead of the `AsyncTask`/`stopSelf()` pattern, but otherwise this seems sound.
in the onRecieve method i aquire a PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, before starting the service, and just before calling stopSelf() in the service, i release it again.
That makes sense. I do much the same thing in my `WakefulIntentService` open source component.
Is this really the best way to do it?
You certainly seem close.
Do i even need the service in this scenario?
If what you need to do on the scheduled basis is guaranteed to only take a second or so, you could do that in the `BroadcastReceiver`. Otherwise, you need to have the work be done on a background thread, and `BroadcastReceivers` cannot fork background threads.
Problem
There seems to be a couple of ways to go about having a background task being executed. My usecase is to have my app fetch a datafeed every x minutes, regardless of my gui is running, and regardless of whether the phone is sleeping or not. I use an alarmmanager to schedule an intent matching a broadcastreceiver. in the onRecieve method i start a service (startService), which spawns an AsyncTask. The task fetches data and stores it and then stopSelf() the service. in the onRecieve method i aquire a PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, before starting the service, and just before calling stopSelf() in the service, i release it again. Is this really the best way to do it? Do i even need the service in this scenario? I experience odd behaviour with this setup, where the setup works for hours and then suddenly stops, which makes it very hard to debug. Does anyone have a simple foolproof method to achive the same end?