How to pre-load a fragment before showing?

Question

In my activity I have several fullscreen fragments, each of them downloads some data from web (using an async task) and shows them to the user. The fragments are showed one at a time.

To be more specific, each of the fragment readings some urls from a sqlite database, and fetch the content before showing them in a list, if that matters. The data loading tasks can be done in the OnCreate() function.

I would like to preload all the fragment (at least starting the downloading), when I show a splash screen. Pretty much like a viewpager preload its fragments.

I am wondering how to achieve this? I tried initialize/create all the fragments in the OnCreate() function of my activity, hoping the OnCreate() of fragments could be called earlier, but the OnCreate() and OnCreateView() function of the fragments are not called until a fragment is about to show to the user.

Answer 1

It sounds like you need to separate your model (the data which is downloaded) from your view (the fragments). One way to do this is to start the downloading AsyncTasks in your activity, rather than starting them in each fragment. Then when the fragments are eventually displayed they can show the data which has been downloaded (or a spinner or some other indication that the download process is still executing).