Listen for Internet Connectivity on Android Clients

[irinagrigorescu]

Android allows detection of network state.

The task is to figure out where in the Activity flow of the Envived Android App we should listen for these notifications and then provide a method to query the status from every Activity in the application.

[irinagrigorescu]

I have tried another approach: instead of implementing a new static method within the Envived class, after further research, I have discovered that the best way to track network connectivity is to create a connectivity change Broadcast Receiver.

It is the first time I am dealing with this, but it seems to be very simple to implement. I have tried it on a test application and every time the network status changes an event is triggered.

When the network becomes unavailable do you think the user should be prompted with a dialog box or something similar? @asorici

[irinagrigorescu]

The push I have made a few minutes ago on branch f/#2 is not resolving this issue 100%.

[asorici]

Completing this issue should entail the following:

• create a base AsyncTask class for sending annotations: SendAnnotationTask. Since the Annotation class should contain all the required data, the preExecute and doInBackground parts of the task can be generalized. The class will call abstract methods in onPostExecute and onCancelled. These will be implemented in specific subclasses (e.g. SendPresentationCommentTask) of SendAnnotationTask. Checking for net connectivity is done in doInBackground. If no connection exists, the ResponseHolder return object will contain an EnvivedConnectivityException in its error field.
• create a new EnvivedConnectivityException to mark the lack thereof
• in the Feature class the init() method throws a EnvivedConnectivityException
• in the InitializeFeatureTask of EnvivedFeatureActivity replace the current Boolean response object of onPostExecute() with a "FeatureInitHolder" object. That is, create the class FeatureInitHolder that will be similar in functionality to how ResponseHolder behaves for server requests
• the exception above is triggered in the startFeatureDataRetrievalService method where the check for connectivity is made prior to the starting the actual Android Service.