Question

Discuss intents and their uses in Android development. Make sure you mention the two types of intents in your discussion.

Answer 1

Answer diven below for this question :-

•An Intent is a simple message object that is used to communicate between android components such as activities, content providers, broadcast receivers and services. Intents are also used to transfer data between activities.

•Intents are like messages that activate software components (activities,servicies,broadcast receivers)

•An Intent may be explicit when it has exactly one target

•or implicit otherwise it just specifies the action the component should provide.

•An intent can also be pending, meaning that some component will be activated in the future

•It can be broadcastwhen it announces something to broadcast receivers

•An Intent is a messaging object you can use to request an action from another app component. Although intents facilitate communication between components in several ways, there are three fundamental use cases: Starting an activity. An Activity represents a single screen in an app.

•Android supports two types of intents: explicit and implicit.

•When an application defines its target component in an intent, that it is an explicit intent.

•When the application does not name a target component, that it is an implicit intent

•Intents are used to signal to the Android system that a certain event has occurred.

•Intents often describe the action which should be performed and provide data upon which such an action should be done.

•Passing control and data from one activity to another is accomplished by asking the current activity to execute an intent.

•Intents are used generally for starting a new activity using startActivity().

• Implicit Intent

The implicit intent is the intent where instead of defining the exact components,

you define the action that you want to perform for different activities.

An Implicit intent specifies an action that can invoke any app on the device to be able to perform an action.

Using an Implicit Intent is useful when your app cannot perform the action but other apps probably can and

you’d like the user to pick which app to use.

The Intent doesn’t specify the Activity to start, but only an “Action”

Intents declares their ability to perform actions in the manifest file

There are several predefined actions in the ‘system’ to choose from

A user can define its own action as well

• explicit intent

explicit intent is an Intent where you explicitly define the component that needs to be called by the Android System.

An explicit intent is one that you can use to launch a specific app component, such as a particular activity or service in your app.

Activities are independent from each other and interact through Intents

The explicit intent targets one specific activity, for example just to change the screen

They are also used to start a service