android - Displaying a ProgressDialog while waiting for a joined Thread

Question

In my Activity, I load the content for a list from a DB, and want to display a ProgressDialog while it′s loading.
I got both working on it′s own, but if I load the data in a thread (which I should do?), the list is displayed before it′s data is loaded. But if I use join, the ProgressDialog doesnt even appear.

How can I combine this? Or is this not possible at all with threads? (AsyncTask maybe?)

Here′s the code for reference:

    final ProgressDialog progressD=ProgressDialog.show(ShopSwitchActivity.this, "", "Loading..", true);

    Thread myThread = new Thread(new Runnable() {  
        @Override
        public void run() {
          try
          {
              getData();
          }catch(Exception e){}
        }
    });
    myThread.start();

    try {
            myThread.join();
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
    }
    progressD.dismiss();

EDIT: Updated Code with AsyncTask:

public class LoadList extends AsyncTask<String, Void, Boolean> {

    ProgressDialog dialog;
    ShopSwitchActivity activity;

    public LoadList(ShopSwitchActivity activity) {
        this.activity = activity;
        dialog = new ProgressDialog(activity);
    }

    protected void onPreExecute() {
        this.dialog.setMessage("Loading...");
        this.dialog.show();
    }

        @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(final Boolean success) {
        if (dialog.isShowing()) {
            dialog.dismiss();
        }
    }

    protected Boolean doInBackground(final String... args) {
        try{
       activity.getData();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.e("error", e.getMessage());
        }
       return true;
    }
}

Edit: My Solution Using AsyncTask now to load the Data, and after it′s done, I refresh the list with the new data.

Answer 1

You can do it with AsyncTask. Write AsyncTask class in your main class that you want to do your operations. You can create the progress dialog in preexcecute of your async class and dismiss in onpostexecute of async class. Here is how you will do this:

  class MyAsync extends AsyncTask<String, Void, Void> {
     ProgressDialog pd;
     Context co;
     MyActivity ma;

     public MyAsync (MyActivity ma){
         this.ma= ma;
         this.co = ma;
         pd= new ProgressDialog(co);
     }

     @Override
     protected void onPreExecute() {
         this.pd.show();

     super.onPreExecute();
     }
            @Override
            protected Void doInBackground(String... params) {
                // do your database operations here
                return null;
            }

            @Override
            protected void onPostExecute(Void result) {
                // show db results and dismiss progress dialog pd.dismiss();
                super.onPostExecute(result);
            }
        }

in MyActivity call as :

MyActivity ma = this;
new MyAsync(ma).execute();