AlarmManager, BroadcastReceiver and Service not working

Question

I\'m refactoring some code so that my app will pull data from a website once a day at a given time. From my research, it seems like AlarmManager is the most app

Answer 1

You could get AlarmManager to run the Service straight away rather than going through a BroadcastReceiver, if you change your intent like this:

//Change the intent
Intent downloader = new Intent(context, MyService.class);
    downloader.addFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK);

//Change to getService()
PendingIntent pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0, downloader, PendingIntent.FLAG_CANCEL_CURRENT);

This may solve your problem!

Answer 2

Instead of using

Intent dailyUpdater = new Intent(context, MyService.class);

use

Intent dailyUpdater = new Intent(this, MyService.class);

Other suggestion is to start service directly from alarm rather than sending a broadcast and starting the service in broadcast receiver.

Answer 3

Figured it out!

MyService should be extending IntentService instead of Service!

With this change, it also means that instead of overriding onStartCommand should be overriding onHandleIntent instead (see docs on IntentService)

So MyService now looks like this:

public class MyService extends IntentService {

    public MyService() {
        super("MyServiceName");
    }

    @Override
    protected void onHandleIntent(Intent intent) {
        Log.d("MyService", "About to execute MyTask");
        new MyTask().execute();
    }

    private class MyTask extends AsyncTask<String, Void, boolean> {
        @Override
        protected boolean doInBackground(String... strings) {
            Log.d("MyService - MyTask", "Calling doInBackground within MyTask");
            return false;
        }
    }
}

Note: From the docs, the default implementation of onBind returns null so no need to override it.

More information about extending IntentService: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/services.html#ExtendingIntentService