Android – the difference between FragmentPagerAdapter and FragmentStatePagerAdapter

androidandroid-fragmentsandroid-viewpagerfragmentpageradapterfragmentstatepageradapter

What is the difference between FragmentPagerAdapter and FragmentStatePagerAdapter?

About FragmentPagerAdapter Google's guide says:

This version of the pager is best for use when there are a handful of
typically more static fragments to be paged through, such as a set of
tabs. The fragment of each page the user visits will be kept in
memory, though its view hierarchy may be destroyed when not visible.
This can result in using a significant amount of memory since fragment
instances can hold on to an arbitrary amount of state. For larger sets
of pages, consider FragmentStatePagerAdapter.

And about FragmentStatePagerAdapter:

This version of the pager is more useful when there are a large number
of pages, working more like a list view. When pages are not visible to
the user, their entire fragment may be destroyed, only keeping the
saved state of that fragment. This allows the pager to hold on to much
less memory associated with each visited page as compared to
FragmentPagerAdapter at the cost of potentially more overhead when
switching between pages.

So I have just 3 fragments. But all of them are separate modules with a large amount of data.

Fragment1 handles some data (which users enter) and passes it via activity into Fragment2, which is just a simple ListFragment. Fragment3 is also a ListFragment.

So my questions are: Which adapter should I use? FragmentPagerAdapter or FragmentStatePagerAdapter?

Best Answer

Like the docs say, think about it this way. If you were to do an application like a book reader, you will not want to load all the fragments into memory at once. You would like to load and destroy Fragments as the user reads. In this case you will use FragmentStatePagerAdapter. If you are just displaying 3 "tabs" that do not contain a lot of heavy data (like Bitmaps), then FragmentPagerAdapter might suit you well. Also, keep in mind that ViewPager by default will load 3 fragments into memory. The first Adapter you mention might destroy View hierarchy and re load it when needed, the second Adapter only saves the state of the Fragment and completely destroys it, if the user then comes back to that page, the state is retrieved.

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