android - <activity-alias> manifest tag - android

In Android, what is the purpose of < activity-alias > ? From the documentation, it seems that it is just another name for an existing < activity > with intent filters that override the target activity's filter (my understanding so far).
What is its practical use ?
Can a caller send an intent both to the target and the alias ?

it seems that it is just another name for an existing < activity > with intent filters that override the target activity's filter (my understanding so far).
I'd define it as "providing additional filters", more so than overriding.
What is its practical use ?
You can disable components, like <activity-alias>. You cannot disable <intent-filter> elements (though that'd be seriously handy).
Hence, if you have an activity that you want to be available all the time, yet only some of the time offer up a specific filter (or filters), <activity-alias> is for you.
A modern example of this comes courtesy of the new Storage Access Framework. It used to be that to make documents available to third-party apps, you would implement an ACTION_GET_CONTENT activity, with an <intent-filter> advertising relevant MIME types (and, possibly, ContentProvider paths for a provider of yours). However, if you are adopting the Storage Access Framework on Android 4.4+, you don't want to also have the ACTION_GET_CONTENT activity available -- the net effect is that everything of yours will show up twice. So, on Android 4.4+ devices, you need to either disable the whole activity (if you do not need it for anything else), or move the ACTION_GET_CONTENT <intent-filter> to an <activity-alias>, so you can disable it separately. This is covered in greater detail in the documentation.
TL;DR: I doubt that many developers use <activity-alias>, though it has its use cases (e.g., the launcher one cited in a comment on your question).
Can a caller send an intent both to the target and the alias ?
Um, if by that, you mean "can I use startActivity() to start either the activity or the alias?", then, yes.

Related

How to get all intent filters for application (with root)

I am working on a system application and I need to know programmatically what intents an application is capable of handling. I have seen other questions related to this, but none of them seem to have an answer but also do not seem to be concerned with system privileges.
PackageManager only seems to provide methods to query activities for a given intent. I can not find a way to get intents for a given activity.
For example, if I have an activity which has intent filters defined as such:
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.BOOT_COMPLETED"/>
<action android:name="android.intent.action.USER_PRESENT"/>
</intent-filter>
And I know the activities class name and package name, I would like to find out from the package manager (or any other source) what intents it can handle (in this case, BOOT_COMPLETED and USER_PRESENT).
Good question. I don't think it's possible to find out the intents that an app can handle. Some standard activity actions and broadcast actions are listed at http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Intent.html. If you are writing your own app that's having it's own intent filters, then i don't think other apps will know what intents your app can handle because there is no way to publish them or announce them to the world, i believe.
But what is possible is that you can make a call for a particular intent and if that returns null, then you know for sure that there are no apps on the device that can handle that particular intent.
HTH.
So after just asking this question, I found this wonderful answer here:
Android — How to I get a list of all available intent filters?
Which leads to this 5 year old issue
So it doesn't seem like there is any way to do what I want to do at the moment. If it becomes available, I would love to know.
you could try a decompiler, such as "DexDump" (available on GooglePlay), and retrieve the "AndroidManifest.xml" of the application you want to know about.

what is difference between public and private Intents

I know that public (named) intents that are registered with the system and can be called from any application and private (anonymous) intents that are used within a single
application. please can anyone give me an example for better understanding.
Thanks in advance
Sorry no time to write a full answer, but you can create custom permissions in order to sign your Intents & BroadcastReceivers.
When you use these custom permissions, only apps that have been signed with the same signing key, and include that custom permission, can see these Intents.
This question might help you:
How to use custom permissions in Android?
#Commonsware explains the issue really well in a recent blog post:
Don't have an Accidental API - The CommonsBlog
The Android documentation does probably the best job of explaining it, here is a relevant snippet:
There are two primary forms of intents you will use.
Explicit Intents have specified a component (via
setComponent(ComponentName) or setClass(Context, Class)), which
provides the exact class to be run. Often these will not include any
other information, simply being a way for an application to launch
various internal activities it has as the user interacts with the
application.
Implicit Intents have not specified a component; instead,
they must include enough information for the system to determine which
of the available components is best to run for that intent. When using
implicit intents, given such an arbitrary intent we need to know what
to do with it.
This is handled by the process of Intent resolution,
which maps an Intent to an Activity, BroadcastReceiver, or Service (or
sometimes two or more activities/receivers) that can handle it.
Explicit intents you use in your activity to start internal activities.
While implicit intents are used often used to launch other activities like when you want to share a link or email something, you send out an implicit intent and let the user decide the email client to use to send the email or to share the link.
There are some instances where you might want to use an implicit intent to run an internal component of your app, because it seems to be more stable.

Android: Proper way to reuse my app's activities?

What's the proper way for other people to reuse my Activities? Should they hard code the intent actions in their app or is it customary to provide them with a jar file enumerating my app's intent actions? Is there a less tightly-coupled way to lookup the intent actions?
First of all, take a look at openintents.org and see if there's any match to what your activity does.
Secondly, documentation is always a good idea.
Having the intent details hardcoded in their applications should work just fine. After all, the intents are part of your public interface and shouldn't change.
Your applications manifest should announce what sorts of things your activity can handle, via intent-filters. Outside users can read the manifest to determine what actions you support, and invoke them via action intents.
See intents and intent filters for more details.

Listing an application's activity and intent-filters?

I am interested in activating another application's activity. I know from reading the Android SDK that it's probably better to do this with an implicit intent. However, this activity doesn't reside in an application I own, so I don't know the action and category and data flags on the intent-filter.
How can I examine an Android applications metadata like the activity classes and the intent-filters for those activities (if declared in the manifest)?
Thanks!
I would try this.
Check on openintents
Contact the developer.
Use android-apktool too see the app's manifest.
It might be illegal to use android-apktool. Use it under your own risk.
There is one more solution: you could run this app and look into logcat. All intents are logged, so you could see what is called up. You won't see extra data though.

Intent resolution in Android

If I want to create custom address book (which overrides my phone's default address book), and if I want it to be used by all applications, what should be my intent-filter? Does Android allow me to do such a thing considering the fact that such a third-party app could potentially be malicious?!
And, if I want to have yet another address book application, I suppose the second app also has same intent-filter, isn't it? How does the framework decide which app to pick if I click on Contacts button when making a call? In other words, how does the framework resolve intents in case,there is a conflict between multiple intent-filters?
You can replace any application on Android platform, even Home. Android documentation explains everything there is to know about Intents and Intent Filters and there is a section called Intent Resolution that answers your question. Intent Resolution section for Intent class has some additional information.
As far as I can tell Android doesn't try to resolve a conflict. It ask the user which application to run and gives them the choice to mark this Activity as the default for this Intent. They give an example about mail app here.
While Mr. Smiljanić is basically correct, there is no Contacts application in Android for you to replace. There is Dialtacts, which is the application supporting the contacts, call log, and dialer. That application cannot be replaced, mostly because the dialer cannot be replaced.
So, while you may be able to override some intent filters and get control on some contacts-related requests, you will be unable to get the contacts portion of Dialtacts overridden, which will confuse users.

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