Android orientation change calls onCreate

Question

I've made a search screen that has one tab for keywords, filters, and a search button, and three optional tabs for the different types of results (each containing a ListView with an ArrayAdapter). When starting the activity, the developer can optionally pass in the results as an extra Parcelable[] if the search has already been performed. In the onCreate() method I'm creating each of the three tabs for the Parcelable[] passed through.

When I call a search from the button on the filter tab, I clear the tabs and recreate them with the new results, which works perfectly. The problem is that when you rotate the device, it appears that Android's automatic orientation switching support recreates the entire activity, calling onCreate(). This means that my search results are reset to the Parcelable[] passed through when starting the activity.

The only solution I've had so far is to call finish() then startActivity() to essentially restart the activity with the new results. I'm sure there must be a much simpler solution and that I've done something extremely noobish.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

Of cource there is. Just add configChanges attribute to your AndroidManifest.xml, like that:

<activity android:name=".MyActivity" 
          android:configChanges="orientation|keyboardHidden" /> 

Activity restart on rotation Android How do I disable orientation change on Android? http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/activity-element.html#config

Answer 2

What you describe is the default behavior. You have to detect and handle these events yourself by adding:

android:configChanges

to your manifest and then the changes that you want to handle. So for orientation, you would use:

android:configChanges="orientation"

and for the keyboard being opened or closed you would use:

android:configChanges="keyboardHidden"

If you want to handle both you can just separate them with the pipe command like:

android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation"

This will trigger the onConfigurationChanged method in whatever Activity you call. If you override the method you can pass in the new values.

Hope this helps.