android - How to get XML using AsyncTask and Timer?

Question

In order to get XML data from a server repeatedly, I'm attempting to use AsyncTask and Timer as per Mark Murphy's suggestion.

I get the following error:

01-07 16:11:26.705: ERROR/AndroidRuntime(729): 
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: 
Can't create handler inside thread that has not 
called Looper.prepare()

I'm using SDK 1.5 with Eclipse on Windows.

I've looked in documentation, on StackOverflow and in the Android Developers group, but I'm not clear what's causing the error or how to fix it.

I can get the data once -- i.e. without Async and Timer -- and parse it via SAX without problems.

Full app code below.

Please excuse any naive errors: I'm quite new to Android.

package com.foo.bar.myactivity;

import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Timer;
import java.util.TimerTask;

import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser;
import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory;

import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.AsyncTask;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.util.Log;

public class MyActivity extends Activity {

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

        setContentView(R.layout.main);

        Timer timer;
        timer = new Timer();
        timer.schedule(new MyTimerTask(), 0, 1000); 
    }

    public class MyAsyncTask extends AsyncTask<String, Integer, MyData> {
        protected MyData doInBackground(String... string) {
            MyData myData = new MyData();
            try {
                URL url = new URL("http://www.example.com/my.xml");
                SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
                SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();

                XMLReader xr = sp.getXMLReader();

                MyHandler myHandler = new MyHandler();
                xr.setContentHandler(myHandler);

                System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "www-cache.example.com");
                System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "80");

                xr.parse(new InputSource(url.openStream()));

                myData = myHandler.getParsedData();
                return myData;

            } catch (Exception e) {
                Log.e(">>>>>>>>>>>> Error getting myData: ", e.getMessage(), e);
                return myData;
            }

        }

        protected void onProgressUpdate(Integer... progress) {
            // setProgressPercent(progress[0]);
        }

        protected void onPostExecute(MyData myData) {
            Log.d(">>>>>>>>>>>>>My data: ", myData.toString());
        }
    }

    public class MyTimerTask extends TimerTask {
        public void run() {
            try {
                new MyAsyncTask().execute("");
            } catch (Exception e) {
                Log.e(">>>>>>>>>>>> Error executing MyAsyncTask: ", e.getMessage(), e);
            }
        }
    }

}

Answer 1

The problem is in the use of TimerTask. TimerTask run should post to a handler, something like this:

private Handler mHandler = new Handler(); 

public class MyTimerTask extends TimerTask {
    public void run() {
        mHandler.post(
            new Runnable() { 
                public void run() { 
                    new MyAsyncTask().execute("");
                } 
            };     
        )
    }
}

Of course this is getting a bit ugly, so would recommend taking out the anonymous class.