Long running operation inside onEvent of FileObserver

Question

I have an activity that contains an Instance of FileObserver. I start watching in onCreate and stop watching in onDestroy of the activity. So what happens if onEvent is doing some operation and the activity is destroyed (user presses back button)? Does my onEvent continue to finish what it was doing? Basically I am wondering whether onEvent should start a service or handle its business itself.

Answer 1

Unless the Application is stopped the code in your onEvent will continue to run.

FileObserver.onEvent documentation

This method is invoked on a special FileObserver thread. It runs independently of any threads, so take care to use appropriate synchronization! Consider using post(Runnable) to shift event handling work to the main thread to avoid concurrency problems.

So the only think you need to be concerned with is what exactly you are doing in onEvent. For instance if you are updating UI or interacting with the Activity / Fragment in your onEvent method then this could cause a crash if the Activity goes away.

With that in mind a service will certainly increase the odds that the application does not terminate while you are performing your work.

Service documentation

The Android system will force-stop a service only when memory is low and it must recover system resources for the activity that has user focus. If the service is bound to an activity that has user focus, then it's less likely to be killed, and if the service is declared to run in the foreground (discussed later), then it will almost never be killed. Otherwise, if the service was started and is long-running, then the system will lower its position in the list of background tasks over time and the service will become highly susceptible to killing—if your service is started, then you must design it to gracefully handle restarts by the system. If the system kills your service, it restarts it as soon as resources become available again...

So the bottom line is that a service is more likely to keep your application alive. Event more likely if you call startForeground but in this case you need to be willing to show a notification to the user.