Re: [android-developers] How to get a service to either return a string or start a function in main activity?

Thanks for your reply.

I found the information about setting flags with startActivity() to be
extremely useful.

However my original question remains unanswered: How can an activity
know when a service has performed a task?

Regards,
Fred

On 22/07/2011, Mark Murphy <mmurphy@commonsware.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 9:05 AM, Fred Niggle <fred.niggle@googlemail.com>
> wrote:
>> Thanks for your reply.
>>
>> I guess my initial question can therefore be reduced to: How can an
>> activity know when a service has performed a task?
>
> You have no activity. That's the point.
>
> Most medication dosing is on a 24-hour basis -- you take the
> pills/drops/leeches once per day. The odds of your activity existing
> at the point in time the 24-hour alarm goes off are negligible. Even
> if the user had been visiting your application relatively recently,
> Android terminates processes to free up RAM as it goes along. You must
> not assume that you have an activity.
>
> Hence, when the alarm goes off, if you want to pop up an activity, you
> need to start one with startActivity(). If you are concerned about
> there then possibly being *two* instances of your activity, add
> FLAG_ACTIVITY_CLEAR_TOP and FLAG_ACTIVITY_SINGLE_TOP to the Intent you
> use with startActivity(). If you do have an existing instance of this
> activity, it will come to the foreground and be called with
> onNewIntent(); otherwise, a new instance will be created as normal.
>
> I recommend that you also give the user an option for a Notification
> instead of popping up an activity.
>
> --
> Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
> http://commonsware.com | http://github.com/commonsguy
> http://commonsware.com/blog | http://twitter.com/commonsguy
>
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