Question

This is a newbie type question. I want to create a public method that can be accessed by any activity in the application. The method I am trying to create is a simple method to show the versionName or VersionCode. here is the code I use in a private method, I just feel like there has got to be a simple way of making this method accessible to all my activities without having to add the private method code to each activity individually, and simply adding a public descriptor doesn’t seem to work…
Thank you!

method:

private PackageInfo getPackageInfo() {
        PackageInfo pi = null;
        try {
             pi = this.getPackageManager().getPackageInfo(this.getPackageName(), PackageManager.GET_ACTIVITIES);
        } catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        return pi;
    }

example usage:

@Override
    public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
        PackageInfo versionInfo = getPackageInfo(); 
        String about = new String(
                    versionInfo.versionName +"\n" + getString(R.string.about));

Answer 1

Define a new class with a static method:

public class PackageInfoHandler{
   public static PackageInfo getPackageInfo(Context ctx){
    try{
     return ctx.getPackageManager().getPackageInfo(this.getPackageName(), PackageManager.GET_ACTIVITIES);
    } catch (PackageManager.NameNotFoundException e)
      e.printStackTrace();
   }
}

use it in your Activity like this

PackageInfo versionInfo = PackageInfoHandler.getPackageInfo(this);

As a addition you could return the string from the PackageInfoHandler and try to give it a better name than i did 😉

Or you could make a superclass of where your method is implemented and extend all your activities from it.