My main activity has some code that makes some database changes that should not be interrupted. I'm doing the heavy lifting in another thread, and using a progress dialog which I set as non-cancellable. However, I noticed that if I rotate my phone it restarts the activity which is REALLY bad for the process that was running, and I get a Force Close.
What I want to do is programatically disable screen orientation changes until my process completes, at which time orientation changes are enabled.
I found the answer. To do this, in an Activity you can call setRequestedOrientation(int) with one of the values specified here: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/R.attr.html#screenOrientation
Before I kicked off my thread I called setRequestedOrientation(OFF) (OFF = nosensor) and when the thread was done I called setRequestedOrientation(ON) (ON = sensor). Works like a charm.
As explained by Scienceprodigy in his self-answer, calling
setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_NOSENSOR);
and then
setRequestedOrientation(ActivityInfo.SCREEN_ORIENTATION_SENSOR);
really works like charm... on real devices !
Don't think that it's broken when testing on the emulator, the ctrl+F11 shortcut ALWAYS change the screen orientation, without emulating sensors moves.