onServiceConnected never called after bindService method

Question

Hi,

I have a particular situation: a service started by a broadcast receiver starts an activity. I want to make it possible for this activity to communicate back to the service. I have chosen to use AIDL to make it possible. Everything seems works good except for bindService() method called in onCreate() of the activity. bindService(), in fact, throws a null pointer exception because onServiceConnected() is never called while onBind() method of the service is. Anyway bindService() returns true. The service is obviously active because it starts the activity. I know that calling an activity from a service could sound strange, but unfortunately this is the only way to have speech recognition in a service.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I can't make up the exact problem out of your description, so I'm going to guess here!

How can bindService() throw a NullPointerException? The only way this could (/should) happen is when you don't supply a Service or a ServiceConnection listener.

bindService() can't throw a NullPointerException because onServiceConnected() isn't called. The call to onServiceConnected() is a product of bindService().

So I guess you are calling a AIDL method, before the Service is actually bond?!

Answer 2

After hours and hours of trying to figure this out, the issue is that the examples that show the creation of the service, don't include the onBind method or they have the following sample code or it generates this for you:

public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    return null;
}

This causes the onServiceConnected method to fail or never actually get executed. The fix is VERY simple, which is the following:

public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
    return mBinder;
}

Answer 3

Thank you soooo much for this!