Professional Android, 4th Edition

6Intents and Broadcast Receivers

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Introducing Intents and Pending Intents
• Starting Activities and Services using implicit and explicit Intents
• Returning results from sub-Activities
• Understanding how Intents are resolved
• Extending application functionality using Intent Filters
• Adding links to text fields with Linkify
• Monitoring device state changes with broadcast Intents
• Sending broadcast Intents within your application with the Local Broadcast Manager

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• Snippets_ch6.zip
• StarSignPicker_ch6.zip

USING INTENTS AND BROADCAST RECEIVERS

Intents are a message-passing mechanism you can use within your application, between applications, and between the system and your application. Intents are used to do the following:

• Explicitly start a particular Service, Broadcast Receiver, Activity, or sub-Activity using its class name
• Start an Activity, sub-Activity, or Service to perform an action with (or on) a particular piece of data
• Return information from a sub-Activity
• Broadcast that an event has occurred

Intents are a fundamental part of the Android OS, they’re also quite unique to Android, and as such can be a confusing concept to master.

Intents can be used to send information among any application components installed on an Android device, no matter which application they’re a part ...