In an app I have very reused Activity, that shows a list of stuff happening on a specific day. The day is specified using Intent Extras.
My problem is, that if the user starts at day=1, then chooses day=2 and then day=1, from the menu, then I would like the back button to go to day=2 and then home. That is, I want to do REORDER_TO_FRONT, but not just based on the name of the activity, but also its extras.
There doesn't seam to be any intent flags suitable for this purpose. I've considered implementing my own 'sub activity stack' using onNewIntent, but it probably wouldn't work very well.
Have you tackled similar problems in your apps? Is there perhaps a way to programmatically access the activity stack, and choose which one is suitable to return to?
Manage your own Activity stack! If I'm not mistaken, you use the same Activity to display each day. Make it single top (FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP). In the launching intent, pass on the current stack, in your example "121".
Respond to the back button event by launching your Activity with a smaller stack: "12" - or if stack is already "", then just let the Activity handle Back event. Then as you mentioned, use the onNewIntent function to update your Activity.
Related
I have an Android app with multiple activities. The main activity communicates over a network and can launch or dismiss various other activities depending on commands it receives over the network. When an Activity is dismissed I don't want to finish() it, just move it down the stack so it's no longer the top activity. What I really need is a FLAG_ACTIVITY_REORDER_TO_BOTTOM but there is no such thing.
There's an intent flag called FLAG_ACTIVITY_PREVIOUS_IS_TOP and the name implies something like that but I don't understand the description:
"If set and this intent is being used to launch a new activity from an
existing one, the current activity will not be counted as the top
activity for deciding whether the new intent should be delivered to
the top instead of starting a new one. The previous activity will be
used as the top, with the assumption being that the current activity
will finish itself immediately"
Could someone please decode that for me, and if it's not what I want IS there some way to tell an activity to submerge itself below the previous one?
This isn't possible. The activities are stacked and you cant put one back under the other. It sounds like you may want to create a class that extends Android’s android.app.Application.
I found this tutorial online and it looks good. Good luck.
Extending Android's android.app.Application tutorial
You cannot move an activity below a certain activity into the android back Stack. The only way to move a activity in back stack is to open another activity on top of it. You can move an activity on top by creating a single instance of activity using FLAG 'singleTop' in this way your activity will be moved to the top of another activity and only a single instance of activity will be there in stack.
More information about activity back stack and Flags is available here.
Go through this information and all your doubts will get cleared about back stack.
i have 3 activities A-B-C .Lets say i am on activity B and from a listview there i launch activity C now if a notification comes which has an intent of launching activity C.
So the problem is I am getting multiple instances of activity C
When i use launchMode singleTop or instance or task the problem of multiple activity instance is solved but the newly launced activity does not work properely as it is desired to be.
Please help me out tired of using flags and stuff but not able to overcome this problem.
The scenario is Just like whatsapp , if u r talking to person one and a message of person 2 come as notification ,when u click on that notification the activity relaunches and works properely. This is exactly what i want. Please help me out how to achieve this . :(
Thanxx in advance
What Flags did you try and what exactly is not working, means, how does the Activity behave?
What you describe with WhatsApp could be achieved with two steps:
Use the FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP for the Activity.
Overwrite the Actvity.onNewIntent(Intent intent) method in the Activity. This method is called instead of creating a new Activity and gives you the new Intent. I assume that the Intent contains all necessary information in the extras.
The user experience should be as follows:
User chooses from the list, which opens the new Activity
He/she can press home or back button from here. This brings the home screen or the list back.
If, for any reason, somebody else calls startActivity for your Activity while it is running, the onNewIntent is called. There you can add code to refresh the content, maybe have an Alert that tells the user that the content has changed, and shows all that to the user.
If the user presses back or home now, he/she will get to the list or home screen
If that is, what you're looking for, then the flag and the method is what you need
In my app I have situations where I need to get a user back to some activity that preceded(not necessarilly directly) the current one. All of those previous acitivities might need Intent parameters in onCreate.
So, my question is there any easy way to get user back to an activity that might not be the direct previous activity he's been on and is it possible to avoid manual workaround of saving/restoring those previous activities' intent parameters ?
Consider an example: there's a global search-bar that can provide users with suggestions on products; once they hit one of suggested items they get moved on a product-view activity where they can reload this activity with another product - walk through. After a couple of such reloads they might decide to go back to the activity where the search was initiated, but it might not the closest to the current one.
UPD: There also should be a possibility to go back in B activities sequence.
Using startActivityForResult() while loading a new activity and using finish() to close the launched activity on back press can solve your problem.
As Android newbie I started to wonder about the Activity lifecycle. I'm having an Activity that loads a list of Persons and displays them. Upon the click of a Person I want to open another Activity showing the details of that Person. I'm currently doing this by creating an Intent on the "PersonDetailActivity" which I then start. So far so good. On the PersonDetail page I would like to have a menu action to go back to the Person list. I again applied the same technique, meaning an Intent that brings me back to the PersonListActivity.
Now I started to wonder what returning to the PersonListActivity means. Will a new instance get created and will I have to reload the persons that it displays in the list? Can you come back to the same instance, avoiding having to reload the list again? Do you then have to pass a pointer to yourself via the intent to the other Activity?
So when will and Activity be re-instantiated and when will it not. Any hints or suggestions are more than welcome. Maybe there are some patterns to be applied for these back and forth menu actions that I'm not yet aware of.
Thanks,
Vincent
Yes,,. Call finish() in second Activity instead of starting new Activity..
There is basically something called Activity stack which stores all Activities in the order they were started.. so if start new Actvity , that sits on top of the stack and preveous one gets below it.. when you call finish the Activity is poped out..
if you don't want to call finish() correct waht ever you were doing then add flag ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP in manifest for the 1st Activity..
Basically if you just call the finish() method on your PersonDetailActivity
PersonDetailActivity.this.finish();
it will activate the onResume() method from the Activity that is on the top of the finished one, which here would be your PersonsActivity. You can specify in your onResume() method what you want to perform when turning back there.
I'm working on a widget for an Android app and I encounter a problem. When the user click on the widget, I'd like the application to open his first activity (the one with intent-filter: 'action.MAIN' / 'category.LAUNCHER') (I'll call it Activity A).
To do that, I use this snippet (in my WidgetProvider class):
Intent intent = context.getPackageManager().getLaunchIntentForPackage(context.getPackageName());
PendingIntent pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);
views.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.view , pendingIntent);
This works very good if my application is killed or if all the activities have been closed (using the back button until the application close)
The problem happen when several activities are open. Imagine the activity stack is like : Activity A -> Activity B -> Activity C.
If I click on the widget, SOMETIMES the application is just brought to front and Activity C is visible instead of Activity A.
It's very strange because this doesn't happen every time. (It seems that it happen after I navigate a lot in activities)
I really need the activity A to open and not another activity whatever how the activity stack was because this activity is like a hub with several links to differents fonctionnalities.
Can somebody help me?
Thank you very much.
PS: Sorry if my English is pretty poor, I'm from Belgium
From a widget you should do more or less the same as the system launcher does with intents.
Try using FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP in your intent. You will also want to look at FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK.
It's better to follow the platform guidelines by the way, which say that you can also inject deep into your app, provided you give the user the right path to navigate up again.
If you want a specific Activity to launch, why don't you just call that activity specifically, instead of dynamically.
You are experiencing issues due to the Activities in your back-stack. Android manages the life-cycle of your Activities in a very special way that you should probably research - http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ProcessLifecycle
calling finish() - will always return to the activity that launched the current activity. The only time your app will close, is if there was not an original activity. You could always test for this condition, and if the calling activity is NULL, you could explicitly call you Activity A.