Managing Fragment States Manually

If you find yourself in a bit of a sticky situation where you need to save Fragment state manually, thankfully Android has a simply way of accomplishing this.

Step 1 - Get the Fragment

Obtain the target Fragment. Assuming you’ve already attached it to your Activity, use FragmentManager.findFragmentById() or FragmentManager.findFragmentByTag(). For example…

Fragment myFragment = getFragmentManager.findFragmentById(R.id.content);

Step 2 - Save with saveFragmentInstanceState

Call saveFragmentInstanceState of your FragmentManager and pass the target Fragment through. For example…

Fragment.SavedState myFragmentState = getFragmentManager().saveFragmentInstanceState(myFragment);

The saveFragmentInstanceState method will return a Fragment.SavedState object which you will hold on to until you need to restore your Fragments.

Step 3 - Restore with setInitialSavedState

When you’re ready to restore your Fragment, call setInitialSavedState(), passing through the Fragment.SavedState object you held on to. For example…

Fragment myFragment = new MyFragment();
myFragment.setInitialSavedState(myFragmentState);

// Attach Fragments....

You’ll also want to implement the onSavedInstanceState() method in your target Fragment. This method will be called when saving state. Put anything you want into the provided Bundle that needs to be persisted (like counters and such) and restore in onCreateView or onCreate.