When you release a newer version of your application, on update the android system identifies from the package name and version number, that the user has an older version installed. During updating not all data of the previous version is overwritten, databases, preferences, previously downloaded/created files on sdcard or internal storage remain unchanged. If there are any incompatibility with the old version of these, is must be taken care of.
First of all, files on the external storage can be lost or corrupted due to many other reasons, so version incompatibility is just one more reason to check those files before using them.
However the internal storage is theoretically not modified by external sources, if there are version incompatibilities, you have to check the state of this files too.
So in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to refresh imageviews' contents periodically (let say by Handlers if you download the picture from web).
I had painful 2 days figuring out what's a good solution here, I tried to give IDs to imageviews and that sort of sick things, but believe me, it wasn't worth it. The solution is so simply that I hardly can believe.
What we're lookign for here is instead of create new Adapters and HashMaps (which contains ListView data), we just update it's values, and Android will do the trick for us.
The most important thing is DO NOT AT ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CREATE A NEW ADAPTER (or a new data source that holds the Adapter's data).
There's an exception of course, you obviously have to create a new Adapter in OnCreate() { }.
In this last part of the tutorial we will implement buttons to the appWidget, which will directly interact with the appWidget functionality.
We will have 2 buttons, a plus button to add one more day to the target date, and a minus button to decrease time left by one day.
First add the buttons to the countdownwidget.xml layout:
As described in the previous part, we will use a Service to update the appWidget.
So we will have the Service below, which gets the command (right now we have only the update command), ant the appwidgetId, reads the date from sharedPreferences and updates the widget.
