Android TimerTask on Background Service

For creating a timer task and running it periodically, say for e.g. making a network ping periodically can be achieved by the below code

class TimeDisplayTimerTask extends TimerTask {

    

    @Override

    public void run() {

        // run on another thread

        mHandler.post(new Runnable() {

            

            @Override

            public void run() {

                

                AppUtils.infoLog("--- Triggering Location Check ---");

                displayTimeInfo();

            }

            

        });

    }

}

if(mTimer != null) {

    mTimer.cancel();

}   // recreate new

mTimer = new Timer();

// schedule task

mTimer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimeDisplayTimerTask(), 0, NOTIFY_INTERVAL);

Handler is mainly used to post data from background thread to UI thread. 

References:

http://developer.android.com/training/multiple-threads/communicate-ui.html