TUTORIAL 30
Now, Your Friends Are Alarmed
One current flaw with Patchy is that if your device goes to sleep, you will
not get status updates on your timeline. Clearly, this must be corrected.
In this tutorial you will have PostMonitor use AlarmManager, instead of its
own polling loop, to wake it up as needed. You will also use a WakeLock to
ensure that PostMonitor stays awake long enough to do a poll of the
timeline. Fortunately, much of this is wrapped up in a reusable component
that you will employ.
Step-By-Step Instructions........................................................................
First, you need to have completed the previous tutorial. If you are
beginning the tutorials here, or if you wish to not use your existing work,
you can download a ZIP file with all of the tutorial results, and you can copy
the 29-SysEvents edition of Patchy to use as a starting point.
Step #1: Import a Reusable Component...........................................
Some guy wrote WakefulIntentService, which is covered in some detail in
The Busy Coder's Guide to Advanced Android Development.
WakefulIntentService is an ideal component to use in this application, to
ensure that if the device wakes up in the middle of the night to poll Twitter
for updates, that the device does not fall back asleep in the middle of doing
that poll.