How do you handle properties that are initialized in the onCreate of an Android Service? Do you make...

# android

[Sebastian Lehrbaum]

How do you handle properties that are initialized in the onCreate of an Android Service? Do you make them lateinit or nullable?

We have them lateinit and we now had an "UninitializedPropertyAccessException" where a variable was accessed in onDestroy but onCreate had not been called before. I did not know that was possible. Now we either make all the variables nullable which adds a lot of null checks or we check "this::variable.isInitialized" which is also not nice style.

How do you handle it?

[Frank Bouwens]

Very interesting! I also didn’t know it was possible for onDestroy to be called before onCreate.

I guess I would leave them as lateinit;
And everywhere assume they are initialized.
Except for in the onDestroy, and do the this::variable.isInitialized there. Not nice indeed. But what else can you do. 🤷

[Chrimaeon]

I would rather question if that just was a glitch in the Matrix 😉

Did you actually init it in onCreate? Do you have it reproducible? Which Android Version? Which device?

The Service’s lifecycle needs onCreate before onDestroy is called.

[Chrimaeon]

Also how do you start the service?

[Chrimaeon]

And to answer your actual question: We built dozens of services and since Kotlin is around, we use lateinit for those kind of properties. If its an Activity, a Service or a BroadcastReceiver , no matter, we never had issues with that.

[Sebastian Lehrbaum]

The service is started by another Service via bindService. The crash happened one time during an automated test run. I don't know how it happened and I cannot reproduce it.

[Sebastian Lehrbaum]

The Android Version was 13. It is an AOSP project, with some system changes but we are not a system service.

[Chrimaeon]

If you cannot reproduce it, I’d ignore it for now 🤷

[Michael Krussel]

Another option is to move the logic out of the service and into another class that you can initialize in onCreate and cleanup in onDestroy make that class nullable, and the only null checks are in the service and no lateinits.