Change annotation name

[stephanenicolas]

Change annotation name

[frankiesardo]

Icicle is the old name that the Android platform used for the saveInstanceState and outState parameters. The onSaveInstanceState() method itself used to be called onFreeze(). There's some nostalgia involved here, plus the whole idea of a frozen state is not that bad. Icicle is the frozen state and Icepick is the tool used to manipulate it!

[stephanenicolas]

I can understand this nostalgia, but still believe the API would be more elegant with a name closer to the lib's name.
:)

[mttkay]

Hah, I actually just cooked up a library very similar to this one and for the same nostalgia planned on calling it Icicle, with the annotation name being @memoize. Found this one when googling for icicle to see if the name was taken.

Thing is, I still plan to proceed with my own library since it is actually more widely applicable, since it can retain class fields of arbitrary types and not just things one can stick in a bundle. I need that since I am preserving complex non serializable objects across configuration changes. It's meant to replace the deprecated onRetainNonConfigurationInstance.

I hope I'm not adding too much to the confusion!

[frankiesardo]

I'm glad I'm not the only nostalgic in the room 💃
I use Icepick as a way to avoid repeating the same code over and over again, but it was never intended as something more than what Android provides.
I'm interested in seeing why you need to preserve such complex objects across life cycle.. component state is designed to be nimble and fast. Anyway, feel free to use the bits of code that you need for your end.

[mttkay]

Cool!

To explain: it doesn't do any magic, and certainly nothing that would be against Android's component life-cycle. Google recommend that in order to replace onRetainNonConfigurationInstance, you move that state to fragments. Since there can, however, still be shared state across multiple fragments in a given activity, what my library does is create a data holder fragment for the host activity that is set to retain instance state.

After a call to onCreate, the activity can then rest assured that all annotated member fields will be initialized with whichever state was valid before, by pulling these fields out of the retained fragment (this is all transparent to the activity of course, there is no explicit interaction with the fragment).

A very good use case for this is retaining AsyncTask or any other concurrency objects across orientation changes, since you cannot stuff these into Bundles.