Using Intents and Intent Filters
Learn about intents, types of intents, creating and using intents, and the importance of intent filters
Introduction
The Android framework provides intents to facilitate the communication between components. We can use an intent to start an activity, start a service, deliver a broadcast, or manage notifications.
There are two types of intents. Let’s get an overview of each.
- Explicit intents expect us to specify the exact component name—such as the application name or the component’s class name—thus satisfying the desired action. This type of intent is usually used to interact with a component in our application, like starting an activity or a specific service.
- Implicit intents don’t expect us to specify the target implicitly. More than one application could perform the action, and we want to delegate this to someone who can complete this job. For example, when we click the “Share” button from the gallery, multiple applications show up. When we fire an implicit intent, the Android framework’s job is to find relevant applications that can handle this kind of job.
Creating an intent
An intent carries information that’s used by the framework to determine which components can perform the desired action. The intent may also contain data that the target component may use.
Let’s talk about some of the primitives generally specified in an intent.
-
Component name: As the name suggests, this defines the component name that can perform the action. For explicit intents, a fully qualified class name needs to be specified, and for ...