Overriding the Activity/Task behavior in Android

Question

I'm writing a simple Android app, and I'd like better control over the navigation/relationship between the activities. I don't want my activities to act like android activities...I don't want them to stack up within the Task. I want one activity (let's call it MainActivity) to be the landing point and always be at the bottom of the stack, and I want only one instance of my second activity (call it SecondActivity) to be above it in the stack...would be nice to reuse it as well. I thought I could get this behavior by making MainActivity be the "main" activity, and declare them both as launchMode=singleTop. This isn't working at all. I provide navigation between them using menus, so when I go back and forth a bunch of times and back out of the app, I go through the whole stack.

How's the best way to have fine control over the Task's Activity stack? I want MainActivity to always back out of the app, and SecondActivity to always back into a single instance of MainActivity. As well, I'd love to get singleTop working so I would use onNewIntent instead of creating and destroying every time. Using the manifest as well as the intent flag is just not working. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Well, you could always just call "finish()" within whatever Activity is calling another activity after the "startActivity()" call. I would definitely advise against trying to stuff an entire app into two activity classes and try to swap views based on what they're doing. If it's that important to you, just close your activities as you launch new ones (obviously not the MainActivity, though).