How to send an object from one Android Activity to another with Intent.putExtra?

Question

Dear friends,

Can anyone guide me as to how I can pass an object of a custom type from one Activity to another with the putExtra() method of Intent???

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You'll need to serialize your object into some kind of string representation. One possible string representation is JSON, and one of the easiest ways to serialize to/from JSON in android, if you ask me, is through Google GSON.

In that case you juse put the string return value from (new Gson()).toJson(myObject); and retrieve the string value and use fromJson to turn it back into your object.

If your object isn't very complex, however, it might not be worth the overhead, and you could consider passing the separate values of the object instead.

Answer 2

If you're just passing objects around then Parcelable was designed for this. It requires a little more effort to use than using Java's native serialization, but it's way faster (and I mean way, WAY faster).

From the docs, a simple example for how to implement is:

// simple class that just has one member property as an example
public class MyParcelable implements Parcelable {
    private int mData;

    /* everything below here is for implementing Parcelable */

    // 99.9% of the time you can just ignore this
    public int describeContents() {
        return 0;
    }

    // write your object's data to the passed-in Parcel
    public void writeToParcel(Parcel out, int flags) {
        out.writeInt(mData);
    }

    // this is used to regenerate your object. All Parcelables must have a CREATOR that implements these two methods
    public static final Parcelable.Creator<MyParcelable> CREATOR = new Parcelable.Creator<MyParcelable>() {
        public MyParcelable createFromParcel(Parcel in) {
            return new MyParcelable(in);
        }

        public MyParcelable[] newArray(int size) {
            return new MyParcelable[size];
        }
    };

    // example constructor that takes a Parcel and gives you an object populated with it's values
    private MyParcelable(Parcel in) {
        mData = in.readInt();
    }
}

Once you have your objects implement Parcelable it's just a matter of putting them into your Intents with putExtra():

Intent i = new Intent();
i.putExtra("name_of_extra", myParcelableObject);

Then you can pull them back out with getParcelableExtra():

Intent i = getIntent();
MyParcelable myParcelableObject = (MyParcelable) i.getParcelableExtra("name_of_extra");

Answer 3

the most easiest solution i found is.. to create a class with static data members with getters setters.

set from one activity and get from another activity that object.

activity A

mytestclass.staticfunctionSet("","",""..etc.);

activity b mytestclass obj= mytestclass.staticfunctionGet();

Answer 4

the simplest would be just use ..wher item is a string intent.putextra("selected_item",item)

for recieving String name = data.getStringExtra("Selected_item");