I have an AlertDialog with a list of strings. The dialog is created in onCreateDialog. My String items will change every time the dialog is shown. The Strings came out of a database so the generation of my strings takes time. So I want to show an ProgressDialog wile fetching my strings from my database. So how can I pasue the onCreateDialog, show a ProgressDialog, get the strings in background and then finish the creation of my AlertDialog? I tried to use AsyncTask but my problem is that when onCreateDialog is called i can't simply start an AsyncTask because onCreateDialog has to return my dialog.