Question

I want the user to be able to click a button and move to a different activity to input some information and then press a button to “submit” that information to the previous screen.

Home Screen –button press–> Input Screen –“submit”–> Home Screen

Is there a way to start the input screen activity and have the home screen wait for a response? This is the code I have now.

Intent inputIntent = new Intent(this, InputActivity.class);
try {
    // Attempt to start the activity
    startActivity(inputIntent);
    return true;
} catch(ActivityNotFoundException e) {
    System.out.println("Cannot find activity for intent: " + inputIntent.toString());
    return false;
}

I guess not only am I asking how to have the home screen “wait,” but it would also be ideal to get back to the same home screen (not creating a NEW homescreen from the input screen).

Answer 1

Yes. Call startActivityForResult() to launch the second activity, and inside the second activity, call finish() to return to the first one. In the second activity, call setResult() to set the result which will be returned to the caller, and back in the first activity you retrieve the result in onActivityResult(). This section of the docs tells you more.

This tutorial takes you through the steps, and a quick search will throw up many similar tutorials.