Btukfyl

I have two cases in which I need to update data from webserver using API in background. To obtain data on request I use okHttp and Kotlin courtines. And now I am wondering which approaches are the best, when:

1. I have listview with data from webserver, and I want to update it, let's say every 10 secs, when application is in that certain view. (I was thinking about using for ex. handler with runnable)


2. I want to display notification when some data will change in some certain way. In that case I think that I should use background service?

With regards,

You might be looking for services: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service

You can think of these like background processes (they're a bit different, though) These run in the background and interact with other Android components like notification manager (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/NotificationManager).

So, essentially, you'll want to create a service to check the API every minute or so, then add a notification to the manager.

IMHO the best approach is to build for offline: store your result in the persistent store (i.e. Room). Subscribe on the query result for your feature. Then you can use the new JetPack's WorkManager for the regular updates ( https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/workmanager/ ). Here is the slightly modified code snippet from the documentation:

val dataCheckBuilder =

       PeriodicWorkRequestBuilder<DataCheckWorker>(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS)

// ...if you want, you can apply constraints to the builder here...



// Create the actual work object:

val dataCheckWork = dataCheckBuilder.build()

// Then enqueue the recurring task:

WorkManager.getInstance().enqueue(dataCheckWork)