Looking deeper into Android Intents
The most operations you plan to perform in Android are defined through the Intent
class. Intents
can be used to start activities like we did, start services (processes running in background), or send broadcast messages.
Intent
usually accepts an action and data that we want to pass to some class. Action attributes we can set are, for example, ACTION_VIEW
, ACTION_EDIT
, ACTION_MAIN
.
Except action and data, we can set a category for the intent. The category gives additional information to the action we set. We can also set the type for the intent and the component that stands for the explicit component class name we will use.
There are two types of intents
:
- Explicit intents
- Implicit intents
Explicit intents have an explicit component set that provides an explicit class to be run. Implicit intents do not have an explicit component, but the system decides what to do with it based on the data and attributes we assigned. Intent resolution process is responsible for...