Tuesday 14 May 2013

Android vm Budget Out Of error While dealing with the large image files in xml

Hi,
While working on my project i found one memory issue in android caused because of the loading the large image files. In layout file i added backgrounds ,top bars......etc those images are some what larger size.These Bitmaps  are caused in android some unexpected error i.e VM budget Out Of error.


 Bitmaps on the previous activity layout are not properly deallocated by the garbage collector because they have crossed references to their activity. After many experiments I found a quite good solution for this problem.
First, set the “id” attribute on the parent view of your XML layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
 android:layout_width="fill_parent"
 android:layout_height="fill_parent"
 android:id="@+id/RootView"
>

Then, on the onDestroy()  method of your Activity, call the unbindDrawables() method passing a refence to the parent View and then do a System.gc().


@Override
protected void onDestroy() {
    super.onDestroy();
 
    unbindDrawables(findViewById(R.id.RootView));
    System.gc();
}
 
private void unbindDrawables(View view) {
    if (view.getBackground() != null) {
        view.getBackground().setCallback(null);
    }
    if (view instanceof ViewGroup) {
        for (int i = 0; i < ((ViewGroup) view).getChildCount(); i++) {
            unbindDrawables(((ViewGroup) view).getChildAt(i));
        }
        ((ViewGroup) view).removeAllViews();
    }
}



This unbindDrawables() method explores the view tree recursively and:
  • Removes callbacks on all the background drawables
  • Removes childs on every viewgroup.