What is AsyncTask in Android (Understanding Android AsyncTask)

About Android UI main thread:

Android handles the task/process on  a Single User Interface Model (UI) which is known as Main thread.

Main Thread cannot handle multiple tasks at a time also cannot handle long process which is time consuming. It can only execute one task at a time. 

What is Async Task?

AsyncTask is the abstract class provided by android, which is use to perform long background operations and show the results on the Main UI thread.

When to use AsyncTask?

Suppose if you want to do network operation or download an image/song. Now if you implement this without using AsyncTask, explicitly it will get executed on Main  Thread.

Hence the above operations are long, so uptill the time is awaited to complete that long operation t complete, so the screen becomes un-responsive. So to overcome this drawback, we can create a new thread and perform these operations on the newly created thread, so the UI remains responsive.

So here we need to use AsyncTask for creating the new thread and perform the long operations in background and return the results to the Main Thread as soon as the operation completes. 

AsyncTask is based on 4 main methods:

1. doInBackground: Within this method you need to write the code for execution and return the result.


2. onPostExecute: This method is called after the completion of doInBackground method, results from doInBackground is passed here as parameters.


3. onPreExecute: This method is called before the doInBackground, here you can place progress bar.


4. onProgressUpdate: This method can be called anytime from doInBackground by calling publisProgress.

Parameters of AsyncTask:

/* Public class abc extends AsyncTask<Void,Void,Void>

Now these 3 parameters of AsyncTask <Void,Void,Void> stands for as follows:

• params

• progress

• result

Params:
params is the parameter passed from outside class, to the doInBackground class.

Progress:
Progress is invoked anytime by doInbackground using PublishProgress to inform the Main Thread about the progress of the task.

Result:
It is returned by doInBackground , and onPostExecute take it as parameters.

Hope you enjoyed reading it, soon i will post a video tutorial for the AsyncTask with example.
Learn and stay tuned for more fun.