Question

I have a service which I know is already running, how does my activity communicate with it without restarting the service.

to elaborate, I have a widget which starts a service, upon click an activity gets loaded, in that scenario the service should still be running.

How do I do something along the lines of:

• conditionally checking if the service is alive
• accessing methods in the service

Basically, the main thing I do not want to do is run startService(new Intent(...)) within my activity. I don’t want to run onStart again within my service.

Ideally I can just add some methods within my service class, and call those within my activity, like I would call any other public method in the project.

I want to start some new threads within my service, and I don’t want to make a second service class if I don’t have to.

Thanks for the insight

Answer 1

The documentation on startService() might help:

Request that a given application service be started. The Intent can either contain the complete class name of a specific service implementation to start, or an abstract definition through the action and other fields of the kind of service to start. If this service is not already running, it will be instantiated and started (creating a process for it if needed); if it is running then it remains running.

…

Returns

If the service is being started or is already running, the ComponentName of the actual service that was started is returned; else if the service does not exist null is returned.

So if your Service is already running, startService() won’t start a new version.