ActionBar progress spinner while Adding 1000's Markers to android Googlemap

Question

I have an Android application that can add 1000's of markers to an Extended GoogleMap using Android Maps Extensions. However i would like to use

requestWindowFeature(Window.FEATURE_INDETERMINATE_PROGRESS);

while the markers are being added to the map which takes 2 - 5 seconds. My problems are:

I have to add the 1000's markers on the UI thread.
The indeterminate spinner is also running on the UI thread so it "sticks" while the map markers are being added.

How do i run the indeterminate spinner in its own thread so it isn't affected by the 1000's of markers being added to the Extended map? The extended map settings i am using are these:

final FragmentManager fm = getSupportFragmentManager();
final SupportMapFragment f = (SupportMapFragment) fm.findFragmentById(R.id.map);
mGoogleMap = f.getExtendedMap();
final ClusteringSettings settings = new ClusteringSettings();
settings.iconDataProvider(new TowerIconDataProvider(getResources()));
settings.addMarkersDynamically(true);
mGoogleMap.setClustering(settings);

UPDATE
I discovered the root cause of my addMarker()
performance issue; every timer i added a marker to my GoogleMap i was calling
.icon(BitmapDescriptorFactory.fromResource(R.drawable.my_drawable))
to customise the marker icon
Once I amended my code to perform this outside my addMarker loop, i achieved the desired response time.
Thanks to MaciejGórski for pushing me to really look at my own code.

What does take 2-5 seconds? If you run `Grid clustering (dynamic)` example from the [Android Maps Extensions Demo application](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.mg6.android.maps.extensions.demo), it adds 20k `Marker`s in few hundred milliseconds. — MaciejGórski, Jul 25 '13 at 13:28
my app has to wait to find your current location using mLocationClient = new LocationClient(this, this, this); then retrieve approx 10,000 rows from sqlite data base to obtain latitude/longitude pairs to plot on GoogleMap, then adds markers for each one, so that takes more than a few hundred millseconds. the markers in the demo are in static arrays of lat long pairs. in addition my app calculates the distance from your current location to each lat/long pair retrieved from the sqlite database. — Hector, Jul 25 '13 at 13:39
Getting `Location` from `LocationClient` is asynchronous, in your previous question you said you are doing database read in `AsyncTask`. These operations could take few seconds totally, but won't block the UI. Are you adding the `Marker`s before of after calling `setClustering`? — MaciejGórski, Jul 25 '13 at 14:17
i get Location from locationClient, then setClustering, then retrieve sqlite rows, then add markers, i need a progress spinner while all this occurs. the progress spinner will be dismissed when the last marker has been added. I would like to use the discreet actionbar spinner however this blocks as i also have to add markers on same ui thread as the actionbar spinner executes in. — Hector, Jul 25 '13 at 14:22
is there really no way to display a progress dialog (that keeps spinning) while multiple "background" tasks complete? — Hector, Jul 25 '13 at 15:10
You describe your code. Why not instead show the relevant part of it and also put information how much time each part executes in? — MaciejGórski, Jul 25 '13 at 16:20
my SQLite database table holds 7130 rows, to retrieve all these takes between 700ms - 1+ seconds. To add these 7130 Lat Long markers to a GoogleMap takes (sometimes) upto 9 seconds (never less than 4seconds). these markers are only located in 16 countries, with over 6000 being set within the bounds of the UK. would this affect the time it takes to add the markers? — Hector, Jul 25 '13 at 19:49
So where is the code that takes model data in memory, loops over it and creates `MarkerOption`s and then `Marker`s? — MaciejGórski, Jul 25 '13 at 20:17
@Hector Thank you for the tip, but where exactly did you put the code for getting the drawables with the BitmapDescriptorfactory? — deimos1988, Mar 29 '14 at 01:00

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '13 at 12:36

If the progress spinner in the ActionBar is similar to ProgressDialog, then yes it has to be run in its own thread to work. Luckily, AsyncTask makes this really easy. An improvement I would suggest is doing your heavy lifting in a background thread. You could start by doing all of your database lookups and such in an AsyncTask. You can still add the markers on the UI thread, but all of the data crunching will be done on a background thread. onPreExeecute(), onProgressUpdate(), and onPostExecute() all execute on the UI thread, so it's safe to do UI operations there. Check out this snippet:

private class SetMarkersTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Marker, Void> 
{
     protected void onPreExecute() 
     {
         // Turn progress spinner on
         setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(false);
     }

     protected Void doInBackground(Void... params) 
     {
         // Does NOT run on UI thread
         // Long-running operation here; create a marker
         publishProgress(myMarker);
     }

     protected void onProgressUpdate(Marker... params) 
     {
         // Add newly-created marker to map
         addMarker(params[0]);
     }

     protected void onPostExecute(Void result) 
     {
         // Turn off progress spinner
         setProgressBarIndeterminateVisibility(false);
     }
 }

This probably isn't exactly what you need, but it should give you an idea of how to structure your code using the progress spinner inside ActionBar.

ActionBar progress spinner while Adding 1000's Markers to android Googlemap

1 Answers1