AsyncTask and error handling on Android
I'm converting my code from using Handler to AsyncTask. The latter is great at what it does - asynchronous updates and handling of results in the main UI thread. What's unclear to me is how to handle exceptions if something goes haywire in AsyncTask#doInBackground.
The way I do it is to have an error Handler and send messages to it. It works fine, but is it the "right" approach or is there better alternative?
Also I understand that if I define the error Handler as an Activity field, it should execute in the UI thread. However, sometimes (very unpredictably) I will get an Exception saying that code triggered from Handler#handleMessage is executing on the wrong thread. Should I initialize error Handler in Activity#onCreate instead? Placing runOnUiThread into Handler#handleMessage seems redundant but it executes very reliably.
Answer
It works fine but is it the "right" approach and is there better alternative?
I hold onto the Throwable or Exception in the AsyncTask instance itself and then do something with it in onPostExecute(), so my error handling has the option of displaying a dialog on-screen.