Question

I am running a Web service that allows users to record their trips (kind of like Google’s MyTracks) as part of a larger app. The thing is that it is easy to pass data, including coords and other items, to the server when a user starts a trip or ends it. Being a newbie, I am not sure how to set up a background service that sends the location updates once every (pre-determined) period (min 3 minutes, max 1 hr) until the user flags the end of the trip, or until a preset amount of time elapses.

Once the trip is started from the phone, the server responds with a polling period for the phone to use as the interval between updates. This part works, in that I can display the response on the phone, and my server registers the user’s action. Similarly, the trip is closed server-side upon the close trip request.

However, when I tried starting a periodic tracking method from inside the StartTrack Activity, using requestLocationUpdates(String provider, long minTime, float minDistance, LocationListener listener) where minTime is the poll period from the server, it just did not work, and I’m not getting any errors. So it means I’m clueless at this point, never having used Android before.

I have seen many posts here on using background services with handlers, pending intents, and other things to do similar stuff, but I really don’t understand how to do it. I would like the user to do other stuff on the phone while the updates are going on, so if you guys could point me to a tutorial that shows how to actually write background services (maybe these run as separate classes?) or other ways of doing this, that would be great.

Answer 1

You need to create a separate class that is a subclass of the Service class.

Service Documentation

Your primary application should can call startService and stopService to start up the background process. Theres also some other useful calls in the context class to manage the service:

Context Documentation