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Intents and Broadcast Receivers

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Handling an Intent from a Filter

4:24 with Ben Jakuben

In this video we will see how to handle an intent in an Activity that has been successfully routed by an intent filter.

Let's go into the detail activity. 0:00
Remember this activity will be started even from other apps but 0:05
that means that onCreate will be called and we can check the intent in there. 0:08
What's important to note is that we now have two different types of intents 0:13
that can start this activity. 0:16
The first is the regular navigation here from within our app 0:18
which we're already handling. 0:21
The second is this new method. 0:22
So let's add a check here after we get the intent. 0:25
We can easily check the actions of an intent with intent.getaction. 0:29
So we'll say if intent.get action equals and 0:35
then we can use some constants from the intent class. 0:41
Intent.action_send, let's add some curly braces. 0:44
And in here, we'll create a new method to handle this that we'll define in a moment. 0:51
Handle, send intent and we'll pass in the intent. 0:55
Let's select this, and hit Alt+Enter, and create the new method, and 1:01
there it is here at the bottom. 1:05
Now back up here the rest of this code can go in an else block 1:08
because we want to work like it did before we worried about this text sharing. 1:11
So I'm going to add curly brace here at the bottom and 1:16
there everything was automatically indented. 1:21
Now there's one more thing here. 1:22
Notice that I've got a highlight on these double equal signs. 1:24
That's because these are actually string values and 1:27
remember we want to compare string values with the DOT equals method. 1:30
So I'm going to change this to dot equals and 1:33
put parentheses around intent.action send. 1:36
There we go, now we can get back to our handle sended pin. 1:39
So in here let's follow the best practice of checking for null first. 1:43
If intent.getStringExtra and 1:47
the name is intent.EXTRA_TEXT. 1:50
That is the name for text data when it's shared. 1:56
If it's not equal to null then we want to show it. 2:00
Let's just display it with a snack bar. 2:04
We will need the root element again which I've already set with an ID in the starter 2:06
files so up here at the top, let's add it as a field private 2:10
RelativeLayout layout. 2:16
And we'll set it here in the onCreate method and root layout equals, 2:21
I'll cast to RelativeLayout, findViewById(R.id.rootlayout). 2:26
Now back in our method, we can make a snack bar. 2:34
SnackBar.make, and then we pass an mRootLayout 2:36
and for our message we wanna use the text data itself. 2:42
Let's call it the same thing, intent.getStringExtra. 2:46
And the key we use is intent.EXTRA_TEXT. 2:51
I'm going to add a comma and again going to drop down to a new line and 2:54
say Snackbar.LENGTH_LONG show at the end. 3:00
So let's run this and see what happens. 3:06
Okay, so the app has started and first let's dismiss our app because we want to 3:11
share text data from somewhere else. 3:15
Now open the browser. 3:18
And let's just share the URL from up here I'm going to click on the menu say share 3:21
page and look at that we see our app down here in the share menu. 3:26
So we'll select it and here comes detail activity and 3:31
there's our snack bar and it's got the URL, cool right? 3:35
Sharing the text data is even easier than location data. 3:39
We don't need to do it here but 3:42
you can check the Android documentation for example. 3:43
Back on our Intents and filters page, click on an example implicit intent. 3:46
And here we see some sample code to share text via an intent. 3:52
Here's ActionSend just like we saw on the other end, and the mimeType, and 3:56
the data itself with the intent.EXTRA_TEXT key. 4:01
That's basically the same code that was used to share the URL inside 4:04
the browser app. 4:07
Well done, so far we've seen how to send and 4:10
receive data via two different intents provided by Android. 4:12
But what if we want to send and receive totally custom data between two apps? 4:16
As always, there's an intent for that. 4:20
Let's check it out after the break. 4:22