Letting a third party app start my activity directly?

Question

Hi,

I'm working on an activity which other 3rd parties want to use in their own apps, via intents.

Right now this activity is catching urls via an intent filter, like this:

<activity android:name=".MyActivity">
  <intent-filter> 
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"></action>
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"></category>
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"></category>
    <data android:host="www.mysite.com" android:pathPrefix="/test/" android:scheme="http"></data>
  </intent-filter>
</activity>

The above works, whenever a user clicks a link in my app like:

"mysite.com/test/blah.html"

my app comes up as a choice, along with the browser, to open the link.

Now if a third party wants to use my app, I think they can use the above like this:

Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("http://mysite.com/test/somedata"));
startActivity(intent); 

While this would work, this probably won't give them the desired effect of jumping directly to my activity from theirs - the android chooser dialog will appear, asking if they want to open the intent data with the browser, or my app.

How can I let 3rd parties call my activity directly without broadcasting the intent like this? I'd like to make them still pass the same exact data scheme to me, but just let them open my activity directly.

Thank you

Answer 1

You would most likely need for them to call your activity directly

Class yourClass = Class.forName("com.yourdomain.yourapp.YourClass");
Intent intent = new Intent(this, yourClass);

If they don't have a jar to link against. Otherwise, they could just use

Intent intent = new Intent(this, YourClass.class);    

And then put some extras in there. The whole concept of the browsable intent (along with the others) is to provide users with a choice of how they would like to view/use something. This is similar to what happens when you click "share" from the media viewer. The whole concept is to give them choice. If somebody wants to just start your activity, they will need to explicitly call it.

Edit: My reflection example above won't directly work unless the Dalvik class loader knows about your class (which it probably won't). You will actually need to specifically tell the VM to load a class from a foreign package. You can do that with the following code

Context foreignContext = createPackageContext("com.yourdomain.yourapp", Context.CONTEXT_IGNORE_SECURITY | Context.CONTEXT_INCLUDE_CODE);
Class<?> yourClass = foreignContext.getClassLoader().loadClass("com.yourdomain.yourapp.YourClass");

Now that they have the class object, they can then fire the intent like before. So the complete code is something like

Context foreignContext = createPackageContext("com.yourdomain.yourapp", Context.CONTEXT_IGNORE_SECURITY | Context.CONTEXT_INCLUDE_CODE);
Class<?> yourClass = foreignContext.getClassLoader().loadClass("com.yourdomain.yourapp.YourClass");
Intent intent = new Intent(this, yourClass);
startActivity(intent);