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.
As explained by Chris 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.
EDIT: this was not the best possible answer. As explained in the comments, there are issues with this method. The real answer is here.