How does a Service communicate with its Activity? How can a Service call a method in the Activity, which started that Service?

Question

Suppose I have an Activity that's a list. It calls a Service when this Activity starts. The Service will do background stuff--download, parse, and fill the list.

My question is this: How can the Service communicate with the Activity? How can I call a method in the Activity, from the Service? (I'm new to OOP)

The Service is started like this:

hello_service = new Intent(this, HelloService.class);
startService(hello_service);

One of the things my service does is download and parse an XML. After that, it needs to fill a list! So, I want to pass the parsed stuff back to the Activity, and call a method in the Activity to fill that list.

Answer 1

I recently asked a very similar question that got a very helpful answer:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2274641/best-way-for-service-that-starts-activity-to-communicate-with-it

Also, consider using AsyncTask instead of a service if the service dont need to be alive when the activity is closed. Then you dont need to bother with the server/activity-communication.

Answer 2

You can set activity object to service and invoke methods of your activity from service. But you must to care about thread-safe when you update your UI.

Hope this helps! Tutorial