Question

i was searching on google for possibilities to callback a client from a remote service.
there where three major approaches:

• client offers AIDL the same way as the service does (bound)
• client listens with a broadcast receiver(onStartCommand)
• use of: client->createPendingResult(), service->send(), client evaluates onActivityResult()(onStartCommand)

i have not found this one:

client activity is launched with “singleTop” in the manifest.
service uses context.startActivity(intent) with the answer within the intent.
client evaluates onNewIntent(intent,..). (onStartCommand)

Are there any potential problems with this approach?

Answer 1

Try the following tutorial:

Android Architecture Tutorial: Developing an App with a Background Service (using IPC)

What we will develop here is a dummy application that contains the following components:

1. A background service doing something important but not immediately visible to the user
2. One or more activities that, once launched by the user, talk to the service, control the service and present some information that the service provides

The architecture also has the following characteristics:

• The service will run in a separate process, allowing the platform to manage its lifecycle and resources separately from the activities
• The service is supposed to run all the time (there are other valid usage patterns for services, but we won’t discuss that here)
• The UI (activities) will get updates from the service in a callback or passive mode, reacting to service events rather than polling the service for updates. This is very important in terms of effective architecture, so please keep it in mind for now
• Since the service will run in a different process, we need to use IPC to talk to it from activities. IPC stands for interprocess communication and is not an Android-specific term but Android has its own implementation (as we will see)
• The service will do all the thinking (business logic) while the UI will be designed to be as thin and dumb as possible. We’ll keep the architecture well-layered
• The service will be configured to start during system boot-up