Communicating between an activity and the browser - callback

Thu, 04/14/2011 - 09:04 | by tamas

SDK Version:

A few days ago Gabor made an article about communicating between activites. I'm currently working on a pet project that uses Oauth with the google data api, where I had to get a response from the browser, so let's take a look at communicating between an activity and a browser.

All the tutorials that I found on the net use onResume to get the response, but I can't recommend that, because onResume runs even on the first run of the app (see lifecycle) which is unnecessary in this case.

To sum up the logic:

open the browser with a callback url provided
user enters credentials
the callback will take the result info back to the app that called the browser.

Opening the browser:
We need to use a service that uses browser callback, for example Google data api (Oauth) via Signpost.

...
String url = provider.retrieveRequestToken(consumer, "putyourappnamehere:///&quot;);
startActivity(new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, url));  
...

protected void onNewIntent(Intent intent) {
  super.onNewIntent(intent);
  setIntent(intent);//must store the new intent so getIntent() won't return the old one
  processResponse()
}
 
private void processResponse(){
  Intent intent = getIntent();
  Uri uri = this.getIntent().getData();  //get your data here
}

You also need an intent filter in the manifest, that will "catch" the response.

...
<intent-filter>  
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"></action>  
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"></category>  
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"></category>  
<data android:scheme="putyourappnamehere"></data>
</intent-filter>
...

Please note that in the code it should look like this: "putyourappnamehere:///", and in the manifest it's just "putyourappnamehere".

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