Question

I’m working on a project that needs an activity to connect to a local service if that service is running and start it if it is not running.
What is the suitable flag for such approach.

Answer 1

This is simply accomplished by, for instance, passing 0 in the last parameter to #bindService(Intent, ServiceConnection, int).

E.g.

bindService(new Intent(this, MrMeService.class), new ServiceConnection(){
        public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
            System.out.println("Service disconnected");
        }
        public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder service) {
            System.out.println("Service connected");
        }
    }, 0);

The #bindService(..) call will return true but the service will not actually start and your service connection will not trigger until someone actually starts the service, e.g. using #startService(Intent). At least this is how it works on ICS and Gingerbread.