Question

Is there a sane way by which we can detect if an Activity is restarted due to screen orientation change or it is merely started because an Intent has arrived?

In my application, I have a FragmentActivity that holds two Fragments. The users can navigate between these Fragments using the ActionBar tabs.
There’s also provision that an Intent to this Activity can carry an EXTRA that can hold an indicator to the default tab to be selected. So, when the Activity starts, any of the two tabs can be selected by default determined by the EXTRA.

The problem occurs when the user navigates to the other tab from the default selected tab. On rotation change, the Activity is restarted making the default tab to be selected from EXTRA again and not selecting the tab the user navigated to.

Answer 1

Send the selected tab name through onSaveInstanceState

protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
    super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);
    outState.putString("tabName", "tab1");
}

and get the value in onCreate

if (savedInstanceState != null) {
            String tabname = savedInstanceState.getString("tabName");
        }