Android Point...: Activity LifeCycle in Android

Android Activity Life Cycle

An Activity is usually a single screen that the users sees on the device at a one time. Any application that has been developed by anyone it typically contains multiple activities.

* Most management of the life cycle is done automatically by the system via the activity Stack

* Activity manager is responsible for creating , destroying and managing activities.

For Example when the user starts an application for the first time, the activity manager will create

its activity and put it into the screen. later, when the user navigating to different screens . The activity manager will move to the previous activity to a holding place .This way if the user wants to go back to older activity , it can be started more quickly , older activities that the user has not used in a while will be destroyed in order to free more space fort the currently one .

In Activity Life Cycle we are having following methods:

1. onCreate()

2. onStart()

3. onRestart()

4. onResume()

5. onPause()

6. onStop()

7. onDestroy()

1. onCreate(); Called when the activity is first created. this is where you should do all of your normal static setup. create views bind data to lists etc, this method also provides you with a bundle containing the activities previous state.

2. onStart(): Called when the activity become visible to the user.

3. onRestart(); called after your activity has been stopped. prior to it being started again

4. onResume(); Called when the activity starts interacting with the user. At this point your activity is at the top of the stack.

5. onPause(): Called when the system is about to start resuming a previous activity. this is typically used to commit unsaved changes to persistent data, stop Animations and graphics that may be consuming CPU .

6. onStop(): Called when the activity is no longer visible to the user. and another activity has been resumed and is covering this one.

7. onDestroy(): Called when your finishing activity.

The activity first time loads the methods are called as bilow:

onCreate()

onStart()

onResume()

When try to click back button or finish the activity the following methods are called:

onPause()

onStop()

onDestroy()

When you click on home button the activity goes to background and below methods are called:

onPause()

onStop()

After hitting home button again if your opening the previous activity which is in background the following methods are called:

onRestart()

onStart()

onRestart()

Here i'm giving small example for how the acitivity life cycle is invoking all these life cycle methods are belongs to Activity class.

ScreenShots:

activity_main.xml:

<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"

xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"

android:layout_width="match_parent"

android:layout_height="match_parent"

tools:context=".MainActivity" >

<TextView

android:layout_width="wrap_content"

android:layout_height="wrap_content"

android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"

android:layout_centerVertical="true"

android:text="@string/hello_world" />

</RelativeLayout>

MainActivity.java:

package com.ram.activitylifecycle;

import android.app.Activity;

import android.os.Bundle;

import android.widget.Toast;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {

@Override

protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);

Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "onCreate()", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

}

@Override

protected void onStart() {

Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), "onStart()", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();

super.onStart();

}

@Override

protected void onResume() {