Android: Passing a Service a Handler

Question

So, I\'ve read the android AIDL documentation and have a general idea of how RPC works between an Activity and a Service. However, for my application it seems overboard to i

Answer 1

Android documentation suggests to work with a messenger as client interface in their Remote Messenger Service Sample: Remote Messenger Service Sample

Code example can be found in the link above, no need to repost here I guess...

Regards, Michael

Answer 2

If your Service and Activity are in the same process, you can pass a Binder from your Service without doing the complicated RPC stuff:

public class MyEasyButNotGoodPracticesBinder {
    public void gimmeHandler(Handler handler) {
        // you got it!
    }
}

IBinder mBinder = new MyEasyButNotGoodPracticesBinder();

public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) {
    return mBinder;
}

Then in your Activity when you get the IBinder object just cast it to a MyEasyButNotGoodPracticesBinder and call the gimmeHandler(Handler) method. Now, I think this is bad practices because if you ever want to put your Service in a separate process so that it doesn't crash the whole process if it crashes, this would break. I don't think it's that future-proof either. But it does work.

An AIDL interface is not that hard - you may just want to do that instead.