Android surfaceview oncreated not called when drawing to bitmap

I'm getting a null pointer exception in SurfaceView.updateWindow and I guess its because I'm in onDraw but have never received surfaceCreated on the surface. So is there a way to work around this or to force surfacecreated to get called when rendering directly to bitmap.

This surface view renders correctly when added as a contentview in an activity. But I actually want to render the surfaceview directly to a bitmap without displaying it anywhere.

SurfaceView constructor:

public ObservationDetailsGraphicView(Context context) {
    super(context);
    getHolder().addCallback(this);  
}

SurfaceView onDraw:

@Override
    protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) {
    super.onDraw(canvas);
    LayoutInflater inflater = LayoutInflater.from(c);
    View detailView = inflater.inflate(R.layout.observation_details_graphic_view,null);
    detailView.setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(
                LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT, LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT));

    detailView.measure(bmWidth, bmHeight);          
    detailView.layout(0, 0, bmWidth, bmHeight);
    detailView.draw(canvas);  //null pointer exception here
}

Calling code:

Bitmap exportBitmap = Bitmap.createBitmap(640, 960, Bitmap.Config.RGB_565);
Canvas canvas = new Canvas(exportBitmap);
ObservationDetailsGraphicView view = new ObservationDetailsGraphicView(this);
view.draw(canvas);

I don't see anything relevant in logcat but here is the relevant part of the stack:

ObservationDetailsGraphicView(SurfaceView).updateWindow(boolean, boolean) line: 473 
ObservationDetailsGraphicView(SurfaceView).dispatchDraw(Canvas) line: 350   
ObservationDetailsGraphicView(View).draw(Canvas) line: 6883 
ObservationDetailsGraphicView(SurfaceView).draw(Canvas) line: 336