Launching activity from widget

Question

I\'m trying to do something which really ought to be quite easy, but it\'s driving me crazy. I\'m trying to launch an activity when a home screen widget is pressed, such as

Answer 1

I just wanted to note this here somewhere as I have been (quite stupidly) battling this all night. Basically I did all the intent code correctly but nothing would be launched.

The problem was that I accidentally had a call like this

super.onUpdate(context, appWidgetManager, appWidgetIds);

at the end of my Overridden onUpdate() function.

Make sure you DO NOT have this call to super as it will clear out all pending intents you've set up!

Answer 2

you must define your configuration activity in res/xml/volume_changer_info.xml. Add this tag and give a fully qualified path to the configuration activity.

android:configure = ""

---

e.g.

<appwidget-provider xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:minWidth="200dip"
    android:minHeight="100dip"
    android:updatePeriodMillis="60000"
    android:initialLayout="@layout/widget_loading"
    android:configure = "org.raza.ConfigureWidgetActivity"/>

Answer 3

I know this thread is ancient, but... Other answers describe your burnt Toast problem. As to why your pop-up activity doesn't launch on touch, you may need to enable the "update" action in order to launch and call your onUpdate() method. For that I think you need to add the "APPWIDGET_UPDATE" action like this:

<activity android:name=".WidgetTest" android:label="@string/hello">
    <intent_filter>
        <action android:name="android.appwidget.action.APPWIDGET_UPDATE" />
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
    </intent_filter>
</activity>

Likewise add the APPWIDGET_ENABLED and APPWIDGET_DISABLED actions if you intend to override those methods too.

It seems to be a very unusual API that requires you to declare the overridden methods that you want called. The usual way to get your custom version of a parent is to simply override/implement them. Maybe there's a good reason for this strange pattern, but it is not a Java pattern that I've seen before. I therefore think it is likely to trip up a great deal of app widget authors. As if app widgets were not confusing enough without this mechanism.