Unnecessary requests on orientation change

[mathieumahe]

Hello,

When the phone rotates (from portrait to landscape or vice versa), new requests are triggered for every tab, which isn’t necessary.

This can be annoying, especially if the user is in the middle of filling out a form.

Is there a way to prevent this behavior? Maybe an option or setting, in case this is useful in some contexts?

Thanks in advance

[leonvogt]

The default Android behavior is to recreates the activity when the orientation changes.
Reason being that the layout might need to change to accommodate the new orientation.

There are multiple ways to handle this and prevent reloading the webview, but the simplest way is to tell Android to not recreate the activity on orientation changes.
This can be done by adding the following attribute to the activity declaration in the AndroidManifest.xml file:

<activity
    android:name="dev.hotwire.demo.main.MainActivity"
    android:launchMode="singleInstance"
    android:theme="@style/MyTheme.DayNight"
    android:windowSoftInputMode="adjustResize"
+   android:configChanges="orientation|screenSize|screenLayout|smallestScreenSize"
    android:exported="true">

    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
    </intent-filter>

</activity>

This tells Android that the activity will handle orientation changes itself, preventing it from being recreated and thus preserving the state of the webview.
Note: screenSize|screenLayout|smallestScreenSize are needed to cover flip and and fold devices.

[mathieumahe]

That makes sense, thanks for all the info!

Maybe it's something that could be added to the default AndroidManifest.xml shown in the documentation? I think it’s something most Rails developers would probably need.