Chapter 4. Exploring the Loader

In the previous chapter we familiarized ourselves with the simplest and high level, Android-specific, asynchronous construct; the android.os.AsyncTask. The AsyncTask is a lean construct used to create background work that offers a simple interface to publish results and send progress to the main thread. In this chapter we are going to move our focus to android.content.Loader, a high level Android-specific pattern used to load content asynchronously from content providers or data sources over a worker thread with content change capabilities and component lifecycle awareness.

In this chapter we will cover the the following topics:

• Introducing loaders
• Loader API
• Loader lifecycle
• Loading data with Loader
• Building responsive apps with AsyncTaskLoader
• Building responsive apps with CursorLoader
• Combining loaders
• Applications of loaders