CWAC StrictModeEx: Punishment for the Bad Code In Your App

StrictMode is a handy feature in API Level 9 and higher, telling you where your Android application is doing things it probably should not on the main application thread.

In the spirit of StrictMode, the StrictModeEx project offers classes to help you diagnose similar sorts of problems beyond what StrictMode itself offers.

Right now, that consists of one class: StrictAdapter. This ListAdapter wrapper will log slow-running getView() calls, plus optionally give you an overall performance view on how your Adapter is doing in the code you control.

Installation

This Android library project is available as a JAR. If you wish to use the JAR, you will need to also add the JAR from the CWAC-Adapter project to your project.

NOTE: The JAR name, as of v0.3.1, has a cwac- prefix, to help distinguish it from other JARs.

Also note that if you plan to use this as an Android library project in source form, you will also need to download the CWAC-Adapter project (and, if needed, modify this project's configuration to point to your copy of CWAC-Adapter's library project). Alternatively, download the CWAC-Adapter JAR into the libs/ directory of your clone of this project and remove the dependency on the CWAC-Adapter library project.

This project is also available as an artifact for use with Gradle. To use that, add the following blocks to your build.gradle file:

repositories {

  maven {

url "https://s3.amazonaws.com/repo.commonsware.com"
  
}
 
}
  dependencies {

  compile 'com.commonsware.cwac:strictmodeex:0.3.+' 
}

Or, if you cannot use SSL, use http://repo.commonsware.com for the repository URL. This should automatically pull down the CWAC-Adapter dependency.

Usage: StrictAdapter

Normally, you create your own ListAdapter (e.g., an ArrayAdapter) and give that to your AdapterView (e.g., setListAdapter() on a ListFragment).

Now, you create your own ListAdapter, wrap it in a StrictAdapter, and put the StrictAdapter in the AdapterView. To do this, just use the StrictAdapter constructor, which takes your regular ListAdapter as a parameter.

By default, the StrictAdapter will log all calls to getView() that take longer than 1ms (1000000ns). You can alter this by calling setThreshold(), which takes the desired threshold time in nanoseconds.

Any getView() call that takes longer than the threshold is logged with error severity to LogCat. By default, the tag will be StrictAdapter, though you can change this via a call to setLogTag().

If you want, you can dump the overall performance metrics to LogCat (debug severity) via a call to dumpResultsToLog(). This will report the total number of getView() calls, the number that were penalized (i.e., exceeded the threshold), the total time across all the calls, and the mean time per call. A call to reset() clears the statistics.

Even on production hardware with a trivial ListAdapter (such as the one in the demo/ sub-project), you will find getView() calls that exceed the default 1ms threshold. It should only be a few percent of the total number of calls, and it could easily represent background work from other processes that happened to steal a time slice while your getView() was running.

Version

This is version v0.3.2 of this module, meaning it is brand-spankin' new.

Demo

In the demo/ sub-project you will find a sample activity that demonstrates the use of StrictAdapter.

License

The code in this project is licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0, per the terms of the included LICENSE file.

Questions

If you have questions regarding the use of this code, please post a question on StackOverflow tagged with commonsware-cwac and android after searching to see if there already is an answer. Be sure to indicate what CWAC module you are having issues with, and be sure to include source code and stack traces if you are encountering crashes.

If you have encountered what is clearly a bug, or a feature request, please post an issue. Be certain to include complete steps for reproducing the issue.

Do not ask for help via Twitter.

Also, if you plan on hacking on the code with an eye for contributing something back, please open an issue that we can use for discussing implementation details. Just lobbing a pull request over the fence may work, but it may not.

Who Made This?

Release Notes

• v0.3.2: updated for Android Studio 1.0 and new AAR publishing system
• v0.3.1: Gradle updates, fixed manifest for merging, added cwac- to JAR
• v0.3.0: migrated to Gradle, published AAR
• v0.1.0: initial release