Bind service to FragmentActivity or Fragment?

android service android-fragments android-fragmentactivity
pawegio picture pawegio · Mar 5, 2013 · Viewed 15.5k times · Source

Is it better to bind service to FragmentActivity:

bindService(Intent, ServiceConnection, int);

or to Fragment:

getActivity().bindService(Intent, ServiceConnection, int);

What is better practice?

Answer

CommonsWare picture CommonsWare · Mar 6, 2013

Is it better to bind service to FragmentActivity... or to Fragment

They are the same as you have them written here. getActivity() is not a Fragment -- it is a method that returns the Activity. You cannot call bindService() on a Fragment.

What is better practice?

Neither. Bind to the Application object, obtained via getApplicationContext(), with the ServiceConnection managed by (or perhaps actually being) a retained Fragment.

The reason is configuration changes. A binding is state. You need to maintain that state across configuration changes. While a retained Fragment can hold onto the ServiceConnection, there is an implicit tie in the system between the ServiceConnection and the Context that registered it for a binding. Since activities can be destroyed and recreated on configuration changes, the Activity is not a good choice of Context here. Application, which is system-global, is a safer choice, and one of the few places where choosing Application over another Context is a wise move IMHO.

Here is a blog post of mine, from a time before fragments, that gets into this a bit more. Here is a sample project demonstrating the technique.

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