Question

I have an Android library that has a Service that creates a Notification. From what I understand Notification must have a contentIntent (PendingIntent) set or a runtime exception will be thrown.

The problem is that I want users to be able to use this Service as is, or extend it, so that they can set the PendingIntent themselves through a callback during the creation of the Notification. However, if they choose not to do this, I need to set the PendingIntent to something so that there is no exception. Is there any way to create a dummy PendingIntent that just acts as a fill-in?

Here’s an example of the code from the createNotification method:

PendingIntent p;
if(getPendingIntentCallback != null) {
    p = getPendingIntentCallback.getPendingIntent();
}
else {
    p = ?;
}
notification.contentIntent = p;

Answer 1

A notification needs to have some sort of action associated with it. You have to tell android what to do when a app user clicks the notification. Letting your library fail if no contentIntent has been defined will let your library user know that they have missed a very important step.

You could check for the pending intent before creating your notification.

if(getPendingIntentCallback != null) {
    p = getPendingIntentCallback.getPendingIntent();
    // create a notification

}
else {
    //don't create a notification
    Log.d("Notification", "Your notification was not created because no pending intent was found");
}

Or to answer the question you asked, you could create a dummy pending intent that performs some arbitrary action like going to the home screen.

See this thread:
How to Launch Home Screen Programmatically in Android