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Intents and Broadcast Receivers

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Broadcast Intents and Receivers

2:27 with Ben Jakuben

So far with Intents, we've focused on sending information to a specific target. In some cases we want to broadcast information to a wide audience of subscribers, and for that we need Broadcast Intents and Receivers.

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    [MUSIC] 0:00
    We're moving right along in terms of the different ways we can share data in 0:04
    Android. 0:08
    Let's revisit our table from earlier that highlighted some of the most common ways. 0:09
    We've covered all these at the top that have to do with intent. 0:13
    The next thing we want to learn is how to combine intents with broadcast receivers 0:16
    to enable an even wider mechanism of broadcasting information 0:20
    throughout an entire Android system. 0:24
    Think of something that might be useful for every app to know. 0:27
    How about when the battery has dropped below a certain level? 0:30
    A well designed app could listen for that kind of broadcast and adjust its usage. 0:33
    Maybe it's trying to download a big file that is draining the battery. 0:37
    Responsible developers, like us, will pause the download or 0:41
    at least notify the user that they may want to cancel it. 0:44
    Speaking of downloads, what about if the network connection drops? 0:48
    If that happens, we'd like our apps to gracefully pause a download and wait for 0:52
    the network to connect again. 0:55
    Or if the user is in the app, 0:57
    let them know that the network is no longer available. 0:59
    There are quite a few system events like this and of course we can broadcast and 1:02
    subscribe to custom events too. 1:05
    A great example is to schedule an alarm to post a notification about a future event. 1:08
    We can deliver that alarm to a broadcast receiver, in an app, which means that we 1:12
    don't need to worry about keeping the app running until that time is triggered. 1:16
    Before we start to build a broadcast receiver, I'd like to spend a minute 1:21
    talking about some important things to remember about them. 1:24
    As I just said broadcast receivers are used to respond to changes in the state 1:27
    of a device, as well as events from other applications. 1:31
    They utilize intents but a different kind known as a Broadcast Intent. 1:34
    There is no way for a Broadcast Receiver to see or 1:39
    capture Intents used with start activity. 1:41
    And Broadcast Intents will never find or start an activity. 1:44
    Another thing to remember about Broadcast Receivers, is that they only exist for 1:49
    a short time frame, 1:52
    specifically the duration of a special method called onReceive. 1:53
    Because of this short time span, 1:58
    they can't do long running work like you'd see in a thread or service. 1:59
    On that same note, they can't interact with the user interface directly. 2:03
    So we can't show a dialog toast or snack bar or 2:06
    make any other changes to the UI, at least not directly. 2:10
    What that means is if there is more work to be done it must be kicked off 2:14
    as a separate service. 2:17
    All right, that's enough buildup. 2:20
    Let's get to some code. 2:21
    Let's take a look at how this works 2:22
    by monitoring the network connection of our device. 2:24

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