Android Dialog Button onClicks

One practice I’ve come to standardize in my apps has been to take dialogs with buttons that perform some kind of action or processing and then dismiss the dialog and instead place that dismiss() call as the very first line within the onClick handler.

new View.OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        my_final_dialog_var.dismiss();
        Thread.yield(); //optional
        /* do my action here */
    };
}

On some of the more sensitive operations (like file delete), I even put a Thread.yield(); after the dismiss so that the dialog will be sure to go away before any more processing is done. The reason you want to dismiss the dialog right away is so that you avoid getting occasional double presses in case the phone is slow to perform your process or action. Nothing is worse from a user’s perspective than to have the phone not react fast enough and so will keep pressing buttons in the hopes that it will finally do something. If you code your buttons to do something each time a button is clicked, then you can have potentially disastrous results. In my case, having multiple file deletes would be a disaster when the user only wanted to delete one file and the phone just hiccuped on the confirmation dialog. Immediately dismissing the dialog gets rid of the temptation to hit the button multiple times while it is doing it’s job.