Question

I’m currently working on an Android App and, almost every time I use it, I get a an error. Most of the time it doesn’t crash the app, but it is still frustrating that I’m seeing this error. I thought I did a check for it, but I could be wrong. Thanks for the help! The relevant code is below. (It’s relevant because the line outside the if statement is throwing the NullPointerException.)

 Activity activity;     

 if(activity == null)
 {
   activity = new Activity();
 }

 Intent intent = new Intent(activity, Service.class);

Answer 1

You should post some more of the surrounding code, but your problem is that creating new Intent requires a valid Context. Usually you create an Intent within an Activity (or Service or BroadcastReceiver) class so you can just do something like:

Intent intent = new Intent(this, Service.class);

Occasionally you’ll create it somewhere else and pass it that valid Context, but you should pretty much never create an Activity by calling the constructor directly. There’s a lot of other initialization necessary to make it useful.