Restarting activity maintaing state with no animation

Question

When the user clicks a button in my application, it will alter some data in the document being worked on and at that point I want the activity to rebuild its UI. I want to do it this way if possible because exactly what views need to be updated for any given change is going to be tricky to know in advance.

I tried getting the intent, calling finish() on the activity then calling StartActivity with the same intent. Using this method I can disable all the pending transitions, so it's fine except because it creates a new instance of the activity its state can't be recovered (unless I do something really dumb like save it to preferences). And this is not acceptable because the activity contains a ViewPager which using this method returns to page 0 whenever I update something.

Next I tried using Activity.Recreate(). This solves the issue around the state not being saved since it appears to be the same instance of the activity. But in this case I can't work out how to disable all the animations, so there is always a flash on screen.

Is there a way I can make an activity.recreate() call look seamless to the user? Or is there a better way? Since this is all within a viewpager, refreshing the fragment would work just as well, but this not happening from the fragment class itself, but rather many objects which each provide part of the UI.

Answer 1

I faced similar problem, when I invoked recreate on activity it was blinking, I ended up using below code:

// uncomment below line for blink effect :P
// recreate();
// restart activity without blinking :-)
Intent intent = new Intent(MyActivity.this, MyActivity.class);
startActivity(intent); // start same activity
finish(); // destroy older activity
overridePendingTransition(0, 0); // this is important for seamless transition

I know I am too late to answer your question but I hope that it will help other developers who are facing same problem.