Sugar ORM blocking UI Thread on init

Question

I'm using Sugar ORM in Version 1.3.1 for my android 5.1 app.

Today, i noticed after installing my app that Sugar ORM is blocking the UI Thread for initialization for about 2.4 seconds.

Is there a way to get this stuff done in a background thread to improve the UX?

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Answer 1

As you suggest doing the data base initialization in a background task is the simplest solution that comes to my mind. At first, I guess you noticed that the sugar creation starts for the first time just when you use an object that extends the SugarRecord. So what I do is pull this action in the very beginning of my app launch (in the background of course). And this is how I do it:

1. First I've defined an object just like this:

    public class DBInit extends AsyncTask<Void,Void,Void> {
    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
            Offer.last(Offer.class);
            return null;
        }
    }
   

   Where Offer is a custom object of mine that extends SugarRecord. That is, by performing a dummy search I trigger the DB creation.

2. I launch this task as soon as possible in the app initialization. For instance in the onCreate, just like this:

    @Override
    protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.activity_splash_screen);
   
        // Init the data base in a AsyncTask
        DBInit dbInit = new DBInit();
        dbInit.execute();
    }
   

I hope you find this workaround useful enough.

EDIT: If you use a version without .last() method you may achieve the same by doing Offer.listAll(Offer.class) instead of Offer.last(Offer.class). However, I would avoid that because you could end up pulling over hundred or thousands objects you have stored in there. So what I do in my projects is to define an abstract class and make my objects inherit from this and not from SugarRecord, let's see it:

public abstract class BaseSugarRecord extends SugarRecord{

    public static <T extends SugarRecord> T checkFor(Class<T> type, final String _id, int id){
        List<T> found = find(type, _id+" = ?", String.valueOf(id));
        return !found.isEmpty() ? found.get(0) : null;
    }

    public static <T extends SugarRecord> List<T> listAll(Class<T> type, final String _id, int id){
       return find(type, _id+" = ?", String.valueOf(id));
    }
}

The parameter final String _id must be the serialized name of the variable used to perform the search. It is recommended to define it inside your custom class as you'll see below. Also the int id is the value of such variable, in this case, a custom ID.

Using this custom class that extends SugarOrm allow me to overload the .listAll method as well as include custom ones. Furthermore, what I'm looking for is to perform a search into the DB that doesn't return a single object in order to save memory consumption. And I do that, then, by changing the function inside doInBackground defined before:

@Override
protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) {
    Offer.checkFor(Offer.class,Offer.ID_OFFER, 0);
    return null;
}

Here I put an extract of how I make my custom objects to inherit from this abstract class:

public class Offer extends BaseSugarRecord {

    public final static String ID_OFFER = "id_offer";
    @SerializedName(ID_OFFER)
    private int idOffer;
    // ...