AIDL: Stub class methods not being called

Question

Hello,

I am using AIDL to pass objects from an Activity to a Service and am getting some strange behavior. To my understanding, the idea behind AIDL is to create an interface in a .aidl file, which android will then implement (partially) in a dynamically generated class. Android will create an abstract class called Stub, which you then need to instantiate and add the implementation of the methods which you defined in your .aidl interface. Once all of that is in place, the remote service can be instantiated, and the methods declared in the .aidl interface file (and defined in your instantiation of the Stub class) can be called.

That is my impression of how this mechanism works, however when I tried implementing it, I notice that the definitions for the methods I declared in the Stub class are not being run; instead what is being run is IBinder.transct()

Here is a snippet of what I'm trying to do:

This is implemented in my Service:

public final INetService.Stub mBinder = new INetService.Stub() {

        public void sendInteger(String ID, int data) throws RemoteException {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub

    }

    public void sendString(String ID, String data) throws RemoteException {
        ServiceConnectionHandler connHandler = new     ServiceConnectionHandler(ID, data);
    }

    public void sendObject(String ID, NetMessage data) throws RemoteException {
        ServiceConnectionHandler connHandler = new ServiceConnectionHandler(ID, data.getData());
    }

};

And this is inside my Activity, which tries to use and talk to the service:

private INetService mService = null;
private NetServiceConnection conn = null;

class NetServiceConnection implements ServiceConnection
{
    public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder service) {
         mService = INetService.Stub.asInterface(service);
          Log.d( "ADDERSERVICECLIENT","onServiceConnected" );
    }

    @Override
    public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) {
        mService = null;
        Log.d( "ADDERSERVICECLIENT","onServiceDisconnected" );
    }
};

 private void initService()
{
    conn = new NetServiceConnection();
    Intent i = new Intent();
    i.setClassName( "framework.network", "framework.network.NetService" );
    if (!bindService( i, conn, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE))
    {
        Toast.makeText(this, "bindService fails..", Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    }
}

....

mService.sendString((char)0, finalMessage);

The methods defined in INetService.Stub, like sendString, appear never to be called; clearly I'm missing something; any thoughts?

Thanks a lot!

Iva

Answer 1

Without the rest of your code, it is difficult to answer your question. See here and here for a pair of sample projects implementing a remote service and its client, using AIDL. Perhaps those implementations will give you some idea of where things are going wrong for you.