Question

I have a service that shows a notification that I wish that will be able to go to a specific activity of my app each time the user presses on it. Usually it would be the last one that the user has shown, but not always.

If the activity was started before, it should return to it, and if not, it should open it inside of the app’s task, adding it to the activities tasks.

In addition, on some cases according to the service’s logic, I wish to change the notification’s intent so that it will target a different activity.

How do i do that? Is it possible without creating a new notification and dismissing the previous one? Is it also possible without creating a new task or an instance of an activity?

Answer 1

No it wouldn’t be possible to change the Activity once you have sent the notification.

You can start an Activity on your task stack that is not a problem, check out the notification service in the tutorial here:

http://blog.blundell-apps.com/notification-for-a-user-chosen-time/

You have to set a pending intent on the notification:

        // The PendingIntent to launch our activity if the user selects this notification
        PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, SecondActivity.class), 0);

        // Set the info for the view that shows in the notification panel.
        notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, title, text, contentIntent);

You can see the pending intent takes a normal intent “new Intent(this, SecondActivity.class” so if you want specific behaviour (like bringing to the top instead of starting a new activity. Add the flags like you would normally to this intent. i.e. FLAG_ACTIVITY_REORDER_TO_FRONT (something like that)