As I wrote in one of my first posts, we use Tabs a lot in our applications. They provide a great way of navigating to different screens through our app. And in order to use tabs, we have to work with something call a ViewPager. According to the official documentation, this is a layout manager that allows us to flip left and right through pages of data. These pages of data are usually composed of Fragments. And in order to increase the performance and efficiency of the application, the views of each fragment / tab, which is off-screen, can be destroyed. The idea is to keep as little information in memory as possible. Sometimes this optimization can lead to problems, if the number of off-screen tabs is not set properly. User input can be lost, views’ state can be reset, etc. Thus, we need to carefully choose that number of off-screen tabs.
How can we do that?
By default, the number of off-screen tabs is set to 1. This means that there can be 1 tab to the left and 1 tab to the right of the currently visible tab, which will be kept in memory. Changing that value is fairly easy.
mViewPager.setOffScreenPageLimit(limit)
That’s all we need. The setOffScreenPageLimit() method will handle the rest.
Resources
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