4.2 Lifecycle of a Fragment

The lifecycle of a fragment is also the same as that of an activity; the only difference is that a fragment’s lifecycle is tied to the activity that it’s hosted in. This means that the activity’s lifecycle events can affect the fragment, but not vice versa. For example, if an activity is destroyed, all the fragments hosted in that activity will also be destroyed; however, you can freely add and destroy individual fragments without directly disrupting the parent activity.

Generally the three major lifecycle methods that are implemented for a fragment are

• onCreate()

  • onCreate() is called when the fragment is just being created and most of the initialization will occur here.

• onCreateView()

  • onCreateView() is called when the system is first drawing the UI for the fragment.

• onPause()

  • Finally, onPause() is called if the user is leaving the fragment, and can only happen when the onPause() of the parent activity is called as well (ie. when the user closes or leaves the activity). If you want to save changes your user made, you would want to do this in onPause().