This lesson teaches you to
Video
Volley: Easy, Fast Networking for Android
At a high level, you use Volley by creating a RequestQueue
and passing it
Request
objects. The RequestQueue
manages worker threads for running the
network operations, reading from and writing to the cache, and parsing responses. Requests
do the parsing of raw responses and Volley takes care of dispatching the parsed response
back to the main thread for delivery.
This lesson describes how to send a request using the Volley.newRequestQueue
convenience method, which sets up a RequestQueue
for you.
See the next lesson,
Setting Up a RequestQueue, for information on how to set
up a RequestQueue
yourself.
This lesson also describes how to add a request to a RequestQueue
and cancel a
request.
Add the INTERNET Permission
To use Volley, you must add the
android.permission.INTERNET
permission
to your app's manifest. Without this, your app won't be able to connect to the network.
Use newRequestQueue
Volley provides a convenience method Volley.newRequestQueue
that sets up a
RequestQueue
for you, using default values, and starts the queue. For example:
final TextView mTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text); ... // Instantiate the RequestQueue. RequestQueue queue = Volley.newRequestQueue(this); String url ="http://www.google.com"; // Request a string response from the provided URL. StringRequest stringRequest = new StringRequest(Request.Method.GET, url, new Response.Listener() { @Override public void onResponse(String response) { // Display the first 500 characters of the response string. mTextView.setText("Response is: "+ response.substring(0,500)); } }, new Response.ErrorListener() { @Override public void onErrorResponse(VolleyError error) { mTextView.setText("That didn't work!"); } }); // Add the request to the RequestQueue. queue.add(stringRequest);
Volley always delivers parsed responses on the main thread. Running on the main thread is convenient for populating UI controls with received data, as you can freely modify UI controls directly from your response handler, but it's especially critical to many of the important semantics provided by the library, particularly related to canceling requests.
See Setting Up a RequestQueue for a
description of how to set up a RequestQueue
yourself, instead of using the
Volley.newRequestQueue
convenience method.
Send a Request
To send a request, you simply construct one and add it to the RequestQueue
with
add()
, as shown above. Once you add the request it moves through the pipeline,
gets serviced, and has its raw response parsed and delivered.
When you call add()
, Volley runs one cache processing thread and a pool of
network dispatch threads. When you add a request to the queue, it is picked up by the cache
thread and triaged: if the request can be serviced from cache, the cached response is
parsed on the cache thread and the parsed response is delivered on the main thread. If the
request cannot be serviced from cache, it is placed on the network queue. The first
available network thread takes the request from the queue, performs the HTTP transaction,
parsse the response on the worker thread, writes the response to cache, and posts the parsed
response back to the main thread for delivery.
Note that expensive operations like blocking I/O and parsing/decoding are done on worker threads. You can add a request from any thread, but responses are always delivered on the main thread.
Figure 1 illustrates the life of a request:
![system bars](../../images/training/volley-request.png)
Figure 1. Life of a request.
Cancel a Request
To cancel a request, call cancel()
on your Request
object. Once cancelled,
Volley guarantees that your response handler will never be called. What this means in
practice is that you can cancel all of your pending requests in your activity's
onStop()
method and you don't have to litter your
response handlers with checks for getActivity() == null
,
whether onSaveInstanceState()
has been called already, or other defensive
boilerplate.
To take advantage of this behavior, you would typically have to
track all in-flight requests in order to be able to cancel them at the
appropriate time. There is an easier way: you can associate a tag object with each
request. You can then use this tag to provide a scope of requests to cancel. For
example, you can tag all of your requests with the Activity
they
are being made on behalf of, and call requestQueue.cancelAll(this)
from
onStop()
.
Similarly, you could tag all thumbnail image requests in a
ViewPager
tab with their respective tabs and cancel on swipe
to make sure that the new tab isn't being held up by requests from another one.
Here is an example that uses a string value for the tag:
- Define your tag and add it to your requests.
public static final String TAG = "MyTag"; StringRequest stringRequest; // Assume this exists. RequestQueue mRequestQueue; // Assume this exists. // Set the tag on the request. stringRequest.setTag(TAG); // Add the request to the RequestQueue. mRequestQueue.add(stringRequest);
- In your activity's
onStop()
method, cancel all requests that have this tag.@Override protected void onStop () { super.onStop(); if (mRequestQueue != null) { mRequestQueue.cancelAll(TAG); } }
Take care when canceling requests. If you are depending on your response handler to advance a state or kick off another process, you need to account for this. Again, the response handler will not be called.