java.lang.RuntimeException: Can't create handler inside thread that has not called Looper.prepare(); [duplicate]

Solution 1:

I got this exception because I was trying to make a Toast popup from a background thread.
Toast needs an Activity to push to the user interface and threads don't have that.
So one workaround is to give the thread a link to the parent Activity and Toast to that.

Put this code in the thread where you want to send a Toast message:

parent.runOnUiThread(new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
        Toast.makeText(parent.getBaseContext(), "Hello", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    }
});

Keep a link to the parent Activity in the background thread that created this thread. Use parent variable in your thread class:

private static YourActivity parent;

When you create the thread, pass the parent Activity as a parameter through the constructor like this:

public YourBackgroundThread(YourActivity parent) {
    this.parent = parent;
}

Now the background thread can push Toast messages to the screen.

Solution 2:

Android basically works on two thread types namely UI thread and background thread. According to android documentation -

Do not access the Android UI toolkit from outside the UI thread to fix this problem, Android offers several ways to access the UI thread from other threads. Here is a list of methods that can help:

Activity.runOnUiThread(Runnable)  
View.post(Runnable)  
View.postDelayed(Runnable, long)

Now there are various methods to solve this problem. I will explain it by code sample

runOnUiThread

new Thread()
{
    public void run()
    {
        myactivity.this.runOnUiThread(new runnable()
        {
            public void run()
            {
                //Do your UI operations like dialog opening or Toast here
            }
        });
    }
}.start();

LOOPER

Class used to run a message loop for a thread. Threads by default do not have a message loop associated with them; to create one, call prepare() in the thread that is to run the loop, and then loop() to have it process messages until the loop is stopped.

class LooperThread extends Thread {
    public Handler mHandler;

    public void run() {
        Looper.prepare();

        mHandler = new Handler() {
            public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
                // process incoming messages here
            }
        };

        Looper.loop();
    }

AsyncTask

AsyncTask allows you to perform asynchronous work on your user interface. It performs the blocking operations in a worker thread and then publishes the results on the UI thread, without requiring you to handle threads and/or handlers yourself.

public void onClick(View v) {
    new CustomTask().execute((Void[])null);
}


private class CustomTask extends AsyncTask<Void, Void, Void> {

    protected Void doInBackground(Void... param) {
        //Do some work
        return null;
    }

    protected void onPostExecute(Void param) {
        //Print Toast or open dialog
    }
}

Handler

A Handler allows you to send and process Message and Runnable objects associated with a thread's MessageQueue.

Message msg = new Message();


    new Thread()
    {
        public void run()
        {
            msg.arg1=1;
            handler.sendMessage(msg);
        }
    }.start();



    Handler handler = new Handler(new Handler.Callback() {

        @Override
        public boolean handleMessage(Message msg) {
            if(msg.arg1==1)
            {
                //Print Toast or open dialog        
            }
            return false;
        }
    });