HttpConnection works only in MIDlet startapp()

Question

I have this MIDlet that verifies if a RecordStore exists and if not it makes a connection and retrieves data from a java webservice. It's fairly simple - i've included the framework below:
public void startApp() {
     rsPatient = openRecordStore(RECORD_STORE_PATIENT);
     if(rsPatient.getNumRecords() > 0) {
          System.out.println("rsPatient: " + rsPatient.getSize() + " bytes");
     else {
          final Hashtable parameters = new Hashtable(1);
          parameters.put("languagePrefix", activeLanguagePrefix);
          showMessageForm("Downloading patient data...");
          Thread connectionThread = new Thread() {
               public void run() {
                    //make a SOAP connection and save envelope
                    WSConnection(aMethod, parameters);
          connectionThread.start();
          try {
               connectionThread.join();
          catch(InterruptedException ie) {
               ie.printStackTrace();
          //do something with envelope
          System.out.println("rsPatient created (" + rsPatient.getSize() + " bytes)");
I'm a bit confused because if i delete the RecordStore (making the MIDlet connect to the webservice) I have no problem connecting again later during runtime. But it seems that i'm unable to make additional connections if the RecordStore already existed. That is, if the MIDlet did not need to connect to the webservice and retrieve the data, later during runtime I'm suddenly unable to connect using this line (which is the very same line as the MIDlet would use earlier if the RecordStore was empty):
connection = (HttpConnection) Connector.open(url, Connector.READ_WRITE, true);
This comes from a SOAP implementation (ksoap2) which I used, so the HttpConnection is a class in package org.ksoap2. I narrowed it down to this line, but no exceptions are thrown, no error messages appear, and a System.out.println of the above line shows nothing. I can se nothing extraordinary going on besides the above frameword that could make a change, so why is this necessary? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You shouldn't be doing all of that in the startApp() method. The lifecycle methods are expected to return quickly, not to do thread-blocking activity like HTTP connections. Try spawning that off into a separate thread....