Launching an intent for file and MIME type?

Question

I\'ve reviewed all the similar questions here, but I can\'t for the life of me figure out what I\'m doing wrong.

I\'ve written an application that tries to launch va

Answer 1

Well thanks to the Open Intent guys, I missed the answer the first time through their code in their file manager, here's what I ended up with:

    File file = new File(filePath);
    MimeTypeMap map = MimeTypeMap.getSingleton();
    String ext = MimeTypeMap.getFileExtensionFromUrl(file.getName());
    String type = map.getMimeTypeFromExtension(ext);

    if (type == null)
        type = "*/*";

    Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
    Uri data = Uri.fromFile(file);

    intent.setDataAndType(data, type);

    startActivity(intent);

If you use a mime type of "* / *" when you can't determine it from the system(it is null) it fires the appropriate select application dialog.

Answer 2

You can use generic intents to open files,like this snippet code that is proposed here:

private void openFile(File aFile){
    try {
        Intent myIntent = new Intent(android.content.Intent.VIEW_ACTION,
        new ContentURI("file://" + aFile.getAbsolutePath()));
        startActivity(myIntent);
    } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}     

But I usually see that Applications checks the file's extension in nested if and finally try to open file with "text/plain" type:

Intent generic = new Intent();
generic.setAction(android.content.Intent.ACTION_VIEW);
generic.setDataAndType(Uri.fromFile(file), "text/plain");     
try {
    startActivity(generic);
    } catch(ActivityNotFoundException e) {
    ...
}     

You can see complete code in this question or in this open source project. I hope this help you.