Auto updating UI with a different thread

Question

I have an Android App which constantly auto updating a list of data from the App's SQLite which an ArrayAdapter is used for handling the data, So for this I've made another thread or handler from the onCreate method of the Acitivity, and inside it's code there's a continuous loop for updating then waiting (or sleeping the thread for a moment, ex/ 10 sec), There are two problems involved: 1- Only the UI thread can touch it's views (though I only touched ArrayAdapter if it counts as a View). 2- Once the other thread starts to run, The UI thread seems to stuck in it, and won't update even the first UI update (complete white). codes for the autoUpdate() method: (which is called on the last line of the UI onCreate method):

public void startAutoUpdateLogData(final int milliseconds){
    continueAutoUpdate = true;
    new Thread(){
        @Override
        public void run() {
            while(continueAutoUpdate){
                try{
                    Log.v("updating..", "");
                    updateLogFromDatabase();
                    Thread.sleep(milliseconds);
                }catch(Exception e){
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        }
    }.start();
}

OR:

public void startAutoUpdateLogData2(final int milliseconds){
    continueAutoUpdate = true;
    runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            while(continueAutoUpdate){
                try{
                    Log.e("updating...", "");
                    updateLogFromDatabase();
                    Thread.sleep(milliseconds);
                }catch(Exception e){
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        }
    });
}

OR

public void startAutoUpdateLogData3(final int milliseconds){
    continueAutoUpdate = true;
    final Handler handler = new Handler();

    runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            while(continueAutoUpdate){
                try{
                    handler.postDelayed(new Runnable(){
                        public void run(){
                            Log.e("updating...", "");
                            updateLogFromDatabase();
                        }
                    }, milliseconds);
                }catch(Exception e){
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        }
    });
}

Neither of these work.

Answer 1

After trying various stuff, I finally found the solution: Anytime you have some long-run tasks to perform, you can assign a new Java thread to execute it, but when there's a need to update the UI from that thread, which can't be directly accessing any components of the UI, So in that case you only need to wrap the code with runOnUiThread() inside the other thread. ex/

private void startAutoUpdateLogData(final int milliseconds) {
    final Handler handler = new Handler();
    continueAutoUpdate = true;

    new Thread() {
        public void run() {
            while (continueAutoUpdate) {
                try {
                    runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
                        @Override
                        public void run() {
                            Log.e("updating...", "");
                            updateLogFromDatabase();
                        }
                    });
                    Thread.sleep(milliseconds);
                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        }
    }.start();
}

Answer 2

You can do many ways. But this one will be more closer solution to what you have done.

private void runThread() {

    new Thread() {
        public void run() {
            while (continueAutoUpdate) {
                try {
                    handler.postDelayed(new Runnable(){
                        public void run(){
                            Log.e("updating...", "");
                            updateLogFromDatabase();
                        }
                    }, milliseconds);
                    Thread.sleep(milliseconds);
                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        }
    }.start();
}