I have activities like A->B->C->D. How can I close the A activity if I have 4 activities on my stack? Also later when I open activity E i want B to be closed aswell, so I want to have C->D->E only.
There is no such as a direct way to manage activities number in stack. So far I know that stack is big as much as available memory.
Also consider LaunchMode and whether activities are in the same task or not.
So, you might implement your own Activity manager to finish un-wanted activities.
Here is briefly how I see the solution:
Create a model to store activity, its index in stack, date ..i.e. ActivityItem
Create an empty List of ActivityItem in your custom Application. To avoid memory leak, use WeakReference. create a public setter adActivity to add and manage activities
Better approach to create activity base class and reuse it as superClass wherever you want to manage count of running activities. instead of repeating same implementation for each different activity.
OnCreate in your base Activity call adActivity and pass current activity.
adActivity job is firstly clean the list of destroyed activities. thanks WeakReference. Then manually kill older activities before last 3 items in your list. It's not easy as it looks.. for example: SingleInstance and rotation will make it challenge to achieve this :-)
that is it.
Good luck,'.
When you start activity use
startActivityForResult(intent,code);//different code for all activity
and call
finishActivity(code);//which activity do you want to close?
You can call:
finish();
after:
startActivity(intent);
In every activity that you want to close, when you open another activity.
Related
The Android Developer Guide states that activities are launched via Intents:
Intent intent = new Intent(this, SignInActivity.class);
startActivity(intent);
For Fragments, the usual way to display it on the screen is as follows:
ExampleFragment fragment = new ExampleFragment();
fragmentTransaction.add(R.id.fragment_container, fragment);
fragmentTransaction.commit();
Why is it that in one case I have to specify a class, and in the other an object? I.e., I would like to use something like
Activity nextActivity = new SignInActivity();
Intent intent = new Intent(this, nextActivity);
startActivity(intent);
Because Activity lifecycle is managed by Android whereas Fragment lifecycle is tied to the Activity in which it is contained.
As mentioned, Activity lifecycle is managed by Android. This is required, among other things, for Android to manage the system resources and also to take care of the back stack.
Fragment, on the other hand, was introduced to modularize and better organize the UI for devices with different sizes. According the the documentation:
Starting with HONEYCOMB, Activity implementations can make use of the
Fragment class to better modularize their code, build more
sophisticated user interfaces for larger screens, and help scale their
application between small and large screens.
To answer the latter part of your question, you can indeed pass the results of an activity to a second activity. But you should never create an instance of an Activity class for that. The right way is to use the startActivityForResult() and send the resulting value to the destination activity through the Intent.
While adding fragment, you are already specifying where exactly to insert that fragment into. So, the ideal way is to,
Create your fragment.
Insert into a layout of your current activity.
Use transactions to remove/manage your fragments, added to the current activity.
In no way, you could launch or use just a fragment, without attaching it to an existing activity.
Android handles Activity life cycle by itself. Just look at the methods of Activity class, they're just like a fill in the blanks. Android calls the shots here. Through these methods it just ask if you want to do something when this activity is created, resumed, paused etc.
The reasons for Android handling activity life cycle internally, are many:
Properly setting up an Activity involves lots of boiler plate code, better let system do it for you. The whole Context and window management is set up for you behind the scenes. Imagine the amount of extra work, if you had to do it for every Activity you created.
Activities are shared, home screen and other applications might want to launch/use them. How would be this possible if they have to call new MyActivity() of some obscure package ? . This is why Activities and other externally invokable components must be declared in application manifest.
Activities from many applications can be parts of an android task ( a piece of work from user's perspective). And are automatically placed/removed/re-arranged on a back-stack. Again, its better Android manage their creation and destruction rather than developers messing with this whole setup.
All user cares is that an Activity must show up when asked for, and just get out of the way if user navigates somewhere else. Android enforces this. Making an Activity appear on its own, or refuse to go away, just because its allowed to be programmed that way, is unacceptable.
Now Fragments , on the other hand are internal. They live inside an Activity and are not accessed from or shared with outside applications or tasks in any way. Fragments are even not a part of application manifest and hence are not exposed outside. Android need not worry about each fragment separately, because fragment life-cycle is bound to that of its parent Activity. Android doesn't care what you do with fragments internally, it can just end the activity and everything inside it is destroyed as well.
I am new to Android development. After learning from many tutorials I got many Activities and many Fragments. How can I make a core engine to check what Activity is running and what Fragment is showing on a container?
Assume that I have:
Acivity01, Activity02, ... , Activity10
Fragment01, Fragment02, ... , Fragment10
I want to make a class that filters the Activity where Activity is on runtime and what Fragment is embeded to that activity.
How can I do this?
If I understand you correctly, you may want to store some references within your Application class to an Activity and to Fragment instance(-s), which are currently in foreground (by this I mean that user can instantly interact with Activity/Fragment).
As for Activity
Create some Activity field in your Application class and getter/setter methods for it (e.g., setCurrentActivity(), getCurrentActivity()). Then call setCurrentActivity() from onResume() method for each of your Activity instances. Don't forget to call setCurrentActivity, supplying null reference to ir in order to properly handle a case, when there are no foreground activities, but application is stll working.
As for Fragment
The general idea is similar to the first item, but there can be more than one Fragment instance in foreground state at time. So you need to store something like List, where you add your resumed fragments and remove paused.
You may also want to implement something similar for dialogs, for example. Then use the same strategy. Hope it will help.
I have a MapActivity subclass and I want to preserve the stack, but I can't keep multiple instances of a MapActivity in the same process. So I have come up with 2 schemes to achieve this:
Pass the state of the MapActivity along with any intents it fires and then let the activities that get switched to reconstruct the MapActivity by sending an intent that recreates the activity. Additionally, the MapActivity would be set so that intents only ever create a single instance of this activity at a time. This approach is flawed as there are multiple exit paths from this activity so all of them would need to be changed to support this.
Replace the MapActivity with a mock activity that does the recreation of the activity in it's onResume() method or something and then the activities you switch to can remain blissfully unaware of this issue. The problem with this approach is I am unaware about how I should go about creating this mock activity and also fire an intent to start the activity I want to switch to.
So my question is this is there a better way to do this and, if not, how would I go about doing option 2, if it is possible?
EDIT: One possible way to do option 2 is to make the mock activity a waypoint that starts the target activity for you in it's onCreate(). But then one just has to be careful that if the onCreate() gets called again because the activity is being reconstructed, that one doesn't start the target activity again. This can be done by checking that savedInstanceState is null.
You should use SingleInstance attribute in the manifest file, this will bring the earlier launched instance to the top of the backstack
<activity android:launchMode="singleInstance"/>
If you have several activities onPause() is there a way to finish a specific activity?
edit: so for example, imagine on start activity 1 is called. Then activity 1 uses an intent to go to activity 2. then an update is made to the database and calls activity 1_new again so that it displays the updated database. At that point i want to get rid of the old activity 1.
It depends on what you want to do. You'll need to look at the AndroidManifest.xml spec for activity calls stacks.
Specifically android:launchMode
<activity android:launchMode="singleTop">
Careful though, launchModes are very tricky and can get you into trouble since it also depends on how the activity is launched from the Intent itself.
singleTop will essentially keep only 1 instance of that activity in the stack.
From the Docs:
If an instance of the activity already
exists at the top of the target task,
the system routes the intent to that
instance through a call to its
onNewIntent() method, rather than
creating a new instance of the
activity.
What I ended up doing here was calling startActivityForResult in the first activity. That way I was able to redisplay updated information from the second activity.
I'd like the activity stack for my app to contain multiple instances of the same activity, each working on different data. So I'd have activity A working with data a, b, c and d in my activity stack ad I'd have 4 instances of activity A that I'd call A(a), A(b), A(c) & A(d). I'd also like to arrange it so that if the user asks to work with data c again then it won't start a new activity, but rather will just bring the already running activity A(c) to the front.
Any suggestions on the best way to achieve this?
So I'd have activity A working with
data a, b, c and d in my activity
stack ad I'd have 4 instances of
activity A that I'd call A(a), A(b),
A(c) & A(d).
That will happen by default.
I'd also like to arrange it so that if
the user asks to work with data c
again then it won't start a new
activity, but rather will just bring
the already running activity A(c) to
the front.
I do not believe that is possible unless you create distinct activities for each letter.
I'm not sure you can do it the way you have it described because fiddling with the activity stack like that is not supported AFAIK.
What you could do instead is just use a tab based activity. Each tab could be another instance of activity A working on a different dataset.
I agree with Falmarri (comment), you cant "switch between activities" in the way you are describing. You can however store that data somewhere (file, database, service, global variable, ext.). Where you choose to store that data (a, b, c, d) is up to you and depends on what kinds of functionality you need your data to have.
As for how you "switch" from one to the other, that is somewhat easier than you might think. you dont actually have to "switch" from one activity to the other, you can just swap our all the data. its is perfectly legal (though not always recommended) to have your entire app exist in ONE activity, and merely switch layouts over and over.
My suggestion would be to swap out the data within one activity. you could even specify which data set you want to load initially in your intent filter.