Question

I am looking to implement the Google IO Rest Structure part A – Using a Service API. So i have identified the following portions of the structure.

1. An interface that provides rest method.
2. A Processor Class that implements the above interface. There will
   many processor Classes. Each Processor class will return a model
   class type.
3. A Service Provider, that deals with a Single Processor. The data
   returned from the Processor is handled by the Service Provider. This
   will call the Processor Function, and obtain the data returned.
4. A SerivceProcessor that is a service class. There will be a
   single class in the application. This will communicate with the
   various SericeProvides based on the Bundle data passed to it.
5. Service helper that provides high level integration between the
   Activity and the Service

Now i am not clear here. The Service has the data that has been requested. How to proceede further. How do i pass the data back from the Service to the ServicHelper. Put it in a Bundle with the tag BUNDLE_EXTRA ? For this my pojo would have to be either Serializable or Parceable. I know Serializable is a really bad option on the Android Platform. What other options are they. Would i be using a Broadcast Intent ?

Thanks for any help here.

Answer 1

You can do a couple of things.

• notifying back to the service helper through intents (letting it implement a broadcast receiver). This might be a bad idea since with a single rest call you can get a lot of rows. In this case you should implement some sort of facility to put your pojos in the intents you are sending back (like a fillIntent/getFromIntent method)

• inside the service provider, store the result data somewhere (sqllite, contentprovider, file) and just throw a broadcast intent that will contain only the requestId and the result of your call.
  The service helper intercept the broadcast and notifies any interested activity that the request has been completed. The activity updates the ui according to that. In this case the servicehelper is used just to keep track of the ongoing request / notify the results.

In my opinion this approach is better because you keep the ui and the model separated, and you don’t demand to the activity the storage of the data, and it’s more “rest oriented”.

Plus: some time ago I tried to implement this approach. It’s not completed but you can check the service helper and the request / result intents here postman lib

A more mature and robust library is robospice, which is what I would use now if I had to deal with rest services.