I've been working with AsyncTasks in Android and I am dealing with a strange issue.

Take a simple example, an Activity with one AsyncTask. The task on the background does not do anything spectacular, it just sleeps for 8 seconds.

At the end of the AsyncTask in the onPostExecute() method I am just setting a button visibility status to View.VISIBLE, only to verify my results.

Now, this works great until the user decides to change his phones orientation while the AsyncTask is working (within the 8 second sleep window).

I understand the Android activity life cycle and I know the activity gets destroyed and recreated.

This is where the problem comes in. The AsyncTask is referring to a button and apparently holds a reference to the context that started the AsyncTask in the first place.

I would expect, that this old context (since the user caused an orientation change) to either become null and the AsyncTask to throw an NPE for the reference to the button it is trying to make visible.

Instead, no NPE is thrown, the asynctask thinks that the button reference is not null, sets it to visible. The result? Nothing is happening on the screen!

I have tackled this by keeping and updating the context reference into the AsyncTask. This is cumbersome and prone to leaks.

Here's the code:

    public class Main extends Activity {

        private Button mButton = null;
        private Button mTestButton = null;

        @Override
        public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
            setContentView(R.layout.main);

            mButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnStart);
            mButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener () {
                @Override
                public void onClick(View v) {
                    new taskDoSomething().execute(0l);
                }
            });
            mTestButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnTest);   
        }

        private class taskDoSomething extends AsyncTask<Long, Integer, Integer> 
        {
            @Override
            protected Integer doInBackground(Long... params) {
                Log.i("LOGGER", "Starting...");
                try {
                    Thread.sleep(8000);
                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
                return 0;
            }

            @Override
            protected void onPostExecute(Integer result) {
                Log.i("LOGGER", "...Done");
                mTestButton.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE);
            }
        }
}

Try executing and while the AsyncTask is working change your phones orientation.