Skip to main content

Clickable widgets in android



The developer documentation has seemed to have failed me here. I can create a static widget without thinking, I can even create a widget like the analogue clock widget that will update itself, however, I can not for the life of me figure out how to create a widget that reacts to when a user clicks on it. Here is the best code sample that the developer documentation gives to what a widget activity should contain (the only other hint being the API demos, which only creates a static widget):







public class ExampleAppWidgetProvider extends AppWidgetProvider {

public void onUpdate(Context context, AppWidgetManager appWidgetManager, int[] appWidgetIds) {

final int N = appWidgetIds.length;



// Perform this loop procedure for each App Widget that belongs to this provider

for (int i=0; i<N; i++) {

int appWidgetId = appWidgetIds[i];



// Create an Intent to launch ExampleActivity

Intent intent = new Intent(context, ExampleActivity.class);

PendingIntent pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(context, 0, intent, 0);



// Get the layout for the App Widget and attach an on-click listener to the button

RemoteViews views = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(), R.layout.appwidget_provider_layout);

views.setOnClickPendingIntent(R.id.button, pendingIntent);



// Tell the AppWidgetManager to perform an update on the current App Widget

appWidgetManager.updateAppWidget(appWidgetId, views);

}

}

}







from: The Android Developer Documentation's Widget Page





So, it looks like pending intent is called when the widget is clicked, which is based off of an intent (I'm not quite sure what the difference between an intent and a pending intent is), and the intent is for the ExampleActivity class. So I made my sample activity class a simple activity that when created, would create a mediaplayer object, and start it (it wouldn't ever release the object, so it would eventually crash, here is it's code:







@Override

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

MediaPlayer mp = MediaPlayer.create(getApplicationContext(), R.raw.sound);

mp.start();

}







However, when I added the widget to the home screen, and clicked on it, nothing played, in fact, nothing played when I set the update timer to just a few hundred milliseconds (in the appwidget provider xml file). Furthermore, I set break points and found out that not only was it never reaching the activity, but no break points I set would ever get triggered. (I still haven't figured out why that is), however, logcat seemed to indicate that the activity class file was being run.





So, is there anything I can do to get an appwidget to respond to a click? As the onClickPendingIntent() method is the closest I have found to a onClick type of method.





Thank you very much.


Comments

  1. First, add an instance variable with a constant.

    public static String YOUR_AWESOME_ACTION = "YourAwesomeAction";

    Then you need to add the action to the intent before you add the intent to the pending intent:

    Intent intent = new Intent(context, widget.class);
    intent.setAction(YOUR_AWESOME_ACTION);

    Next, override the onReceive method:

    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
    super.onReceive(context, intent);


    And then respond to your button presses by querying the intent returned for your action within the onReceive method:

    if (intent.getAction().equals(YOUR_AWESOME_ACTION)) {
    //do some really cool stuff here
    }


    And that should do it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can take a look at Wikitionary sample in SDK to see how they process click. They do the same as you do and it works.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had exactly the same problem and the given solution from Brian515 didn't help.
    In my case the configuration activiy won't open unless one of the following:
    1. Wait several minutes (more than 30 minutes).
    2. Add another widget. The first one would not open configuration activiy on click but the rest would.

    BTW, the widget behaved this way with or without the suggested solution here and I could not see any evidence of the program stepping into onRecieve with the given Intent.

    ReplyDelete
  4. RemoteViews views = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(),
    R.layout.appwidget_provider_layout);


    This did not work for me either but I changed it to reference the layout file.

    RemoteViews views = new RemoteViews(context.getPackageName(),
    R.layout.nameofthexmllayoutfile);

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why is this Javascript much *slower* than its jQuery equivalent?

I have a HTML list of about 500 items and a "filter" box above it. I started by using jQuery to filter the list when I typed a letter (timing code added later): $('#filter').keyup( function() { var jqStart = (new Date).getTime(); var search = $(this).val().toLowerCase(); var $list = $('ul.ablist > li'); $list.each( function() { if ( $(this).text().toLowerCase().indexOf(search) === -1 ) $(this).hide(); else $(this).show(); } ); console.log('Time: ' + ((new Date).getTime() - jqStart)); } ); However, there was a couple of seconds delay after typing each letter (particularly the first letter). So I thought it may be slightly quicker if I used plain Javascript (I read recently that jQuery's each function is particularly slow). Here's my JS equivalent: document.getElementById('filter').addEventListener( 'keyup', function () { var jsStart = (new Date).getTime()...

Is it possible to have IF statement in an Echo statement in PHP

Thanks in advance. I did look at the other questions/answers that were similar and didn't find exactly what I was looking for. I'm trying to do this, am I on the right path? echo " <div id='tabs-".$match."'> <textarea id='".$match."' name='".$match."'>". if ($COLUMN_NAME === $match) { echo $FIELD_WITH_COLUMN_NAME; } else { } ."</textarea> <script type='text/javascript'> CKEDITOR.replace( '".$match."' ); </script> </div>"; I am getting the following error message in the browser: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF Please let me know if this is the right way to go about nesting an IF statement inside an echo. Thank you.