Inform Activity from a BroadcastReceiver ONLY if it is in the foreground

Question

Maybe it\'s easy, but I couldn\'t really figure this out right so far... I got a BroadcastReceiver waiting to get triggered by the AlarmMangager - this works fi

Answer 1

So this is almost Bino's answer, but: instead of moving the receiver into the activity, use two receivers, with different Intents. The first one is your original alarm Intent, with a receiver registered in the manifest as you already have, and then that receiver sends a second broadcast intent, which is handled by a receiver registered by the activity as Bino says.

I've done this in my own timer project, on github. Here are the alarm receiver and the requery receiver. Hope that helps.

Answer 2

I believe that you're familiar with AlarmManager now (creating a new Alarm, register a receiver...) so I will not talk about that. Just give you a solution for your question.

Instead of registering a BroadcastReceiver in a class file and in manifest, you only create a new BroadcastReceiver in your activity, and then, register it in onResume method, and unregister it in onPause method, sth like this in your activity:

private BroadcastReceiver mIntentReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
      //do something       
    }
};

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);

    mIntentFilter = new IntentFilter();
    mIntentFilter.addAction("your alarm action");
    ...
}

@Override
protected void onResume() {
registerReceiver(mIntentReceiver, mIntentFilter);
    ...
super.onResume();
}

@Override
protected void onPause() {
unregisterReceiver(mIntentReceiver);
    ...
super.onPause();
}

The receiver will only receive the alarm intent when your activity is in foreground :)

(Sorry if my English is not clear)