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POAndroid - update widget over service with data from network. Best approach?
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copied!<p>I have a question regarding Android widgets and especially Android services. Here is what I want to do: On the phone the user should be able to add my widget to his homescreen. The widget gets its data from network. After reading some tutrials about this, I found out that the best approach would be to create a service that gets the data from network (TCP sockets) and then updates the widget constantly. That is done with ScheduledExecutorService which executes a Runnable in a certain interval. The Runnable will connect to a server, get the data and should update the widget).</p> <p>My problem is now, that the widget don't need to be updated when the screen is off and so the service should not run because of battery drain. My question is: How to do it the best way?</p> <p><strong>I found 2 approaches which would more or less do what I want:</strong></p> <ol> <li><p>When the first instance of the widget is added to homescreen, it will register a Broadcast Receiver that receives the ACTION_SCREEN_ON and ACTION_SCREEN_OFF intent action from Android OS. If ACTION_SCREEN_ON is fired, it will start the updater service, otherwise it will stop it. But I'm really unsure if that's a good approach because of the broadcast receiver lifetime.</p></li> <li><p>In the updater service's Runnable, which is executed periodically by the ScheduledExecutorService and actually does the network stuff, I check via PowerManager.isScreenOn(), if the screen is on. If yes, I execute the network code, otherwise not. But what is when the device is in standby? Is this code executed then? What about battery drain here?</p></li> </ol> <p>Is there maybe a "best practice" approach for what I want to do? I've read alot about the AlarmManager and that it is a very powerful tool. Can you schedule tasks with this in the way, that they are only executed when the display is on?</p> <p>Thanks for your help.</p> <p>Best Regards NiThDi</p>

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