Develop Reference

A general Android intent for a dictionary / encyclopedia / etc

Does there exist such a thing, where you send it a string as data, and it knows to open the application with the entry for that string?
Thanks.

if you want to allow user to search something new. Than you can not depend on other applications. This will launch the browser(which is present in all the android devices) with your text as the url so that user can search it using your app.
try this:
String url = "the text you want to search";
Intent i = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
i.setData(Uri.parse(url));
startActivity(i);
Or
the dictionary must have Broadcast Reciever

Setting default browser for activity programmatically

I'm developing an android app and among other functionality I need to open some urls in external web browser. Can I programmatically set a default application for that, so the user won't be able to choose from the list of available browsers? I mean, I want to set default browser only for my app but not for the whole operating system.

Yes, for this you can force your application to always open native android browser only. For this you have to identify the launching Activity of Browser application, something like this:
Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setComponent(new ComponentName("com.google.android.browser","com.google.android.browser.BrowserActivity"));
intent.setAction("android.intent.action.VIEW");
intent.addCategory("android.intent.category.BROWSABLE");
Uri uri = Uri.parse(url);
intent.setData(uri);
try
{
startActivity(intent);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}

You can use .setPackage for the intent: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html#setPackage(java.lang.String) . Call it with the browser's package name (defined in its manifest, package attribute).
I'm using something similar for firing up the Google+ application for sharing a string:
Intent shareIntent = ShareCompat.IntentBuilder.from(getActivity())
.setText("Dummy string to share")
.setType("text/plain")
.getIntent()
.setPackage("com.google.android.apps.plus");
startActivity(shareIntent);
In my example, "com.google.android.apps.plus" is the package name for the Google+ application.

Sharedpreference for Browser class is "MODE_private" , so we can't access the home_page changing steps directly programatically,
iff we want to do, we should do through Browser.java opensource code and we should get some idea from there itself.

Android: starting a default application or one which may be different on different devices

I would like to start a default application: browser, contact-book, phone, email, music app, etc. I have found many q/a, like browser opening a specific URL or blank, and here the answer is even "No not possible". But I would like to just open/launch it without telling it to go to a specific URL or sending a mail to someone, etc.
However, I also saw some Home applications where this seems to be working (at least for some apps). On my colleague's device there is for example a different contact-book (no google) which is detected and opened correctly.
I have seen in the Android documentation some intent categories that point to these problems, but these are only >= API.11. So I can't use/test them on my device.
Question: Is it not somehow possible to launch a default application (having the app chooser is of course ok) without providing extra data? If no, what do you think are these Home apps doing (perhaps workarounds are somehow possible).
PS: for the phone app I think, I have a workaround using Intent.ACTION_DIAL without any other information which will open simply the dialer.
UPDATE: I modified the title. Some applications like the address book may not be the same on different devices. So in this case I would like to start the address-book app, whichever this is.

This answer is not a 100% answer, but some workarounds on some typical applications.
Still open are: music player, address book
Browser: I get a list of applications that handle "http"-data intents, and then I look if one is available in the list of preferred applications.
Intent appFilter = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
appFilter.setData(Uri.parse("http://www.google.com"));
List<ResolveInfo> browserInfoList = pm.queryIntentActivities(appFilter, 0);
List<IntentFilter> outFilters = new ArrayList<IntentFilter>();
List<ComponentName> outActivities = new ArrayList<ComponentName>();
pm.getPreferredActivities(outFilters, outActivities, null);
if(outActivities.size() > 0) {
for(ComponentName cn : outActivities) {
String cnClass = cn.getClassName();
String cnPkg = cn.getPackageName();
for (ResolveInfo info : browserInfoList) {
if(info.activityInfo.name.equals(cnClass) &&
info.activityInfo.packageName.equals(cnPkg)) {
return cn;
}
}
}
}
In case no default is found, I open a browser chooser dialog, see here.
Phone: as described in the question:
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_DIAL);
startActivity(intent);

You can start apps by the function "startActivity" if you know about the canonical app name
like "android.com.browser". Do this simple by searching for AndroidManifest.xml in the app
source code (look at Codeaurora.com or at github/Cyanogenmod) and grab the app name you want.
After you know about the App name ("Activity") implement the code as follows:
Intent intent = new Intent();
intent.setClassName(this, "com.android.browser");
intent.setCategory(Intent.ACTION_MAIN);
startActivity(intent);
THIS is only a example, sometimes you have to put intent extras or data values, this information can be found in the app's AndroidManifest.xml too.

Android : Download file without .pfd, .png... at end of the link

I try to download a file through the browser. it's working perfectly if a have that :
String pdfUrl = "www.myLink.com/document/test.pdf";
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intent.setData(Uri.parse(pdfUrl));
startActivity(intent);
However if the link is :
String pdfUrl = "www.myLink.com/document/test/";
It's very odd because it works on my browser "Chrome". I can download the 2 files....

Using the URL without the full file name will not work, because the Intent system does not know the type of the resource behind the URI - it will probably launch a browser pointed to that address instead of a PDF viewer. What you could do, however, is explicitly specify the content type behind your URL by using intent.setDataAndType() instead of intent.setData(), like this:
String pdfUrl = "www.myLink.com/document/test/";
Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
intent.setDataAndType(Uri.parse(pdfUrl), "application/pdf");
startActivity(intent);

Android - Call default browser with and redirect to a designated url

Hi
I want to write an app to call default browser and redirect to a designated url.
Any suggestion to 1)call the default browser, 2)redirect to a designated url.
Thanks

you just want to launch an ACTION_VIEW intent with the Uri of the webpage as your data element :
Intent httpIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
httpIntent.setData(Uri.parse("http://www.bbc.co.uk"));
startActivity(httpIntent);

To open the default browser use an Intent with the action VIEW. To tell the browser which page to load us the data-part of the Intent.
Example:
Intent browse = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://stackoverflow.com"));
startActivity(browse);
Since this is a basic task in Android you might want to read some basics about Intents in Android.