How to call to get a single gps fix when ever i want android?

Question

How can I get a single GPS fix of my location just by calling one function? Just for this example how can I get the Lat and Lon into a toast.

Answer 1

What have you tried?

Here are two of the official pages for location: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Location.html http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/LocationManager.html

But to get the most recent location and show it in a Toast:

LocationManager locMan = (LocationManager)context.getSystemService(Context.LOCATION_SERVICE);
Location loc = locMan.getLastKnownLocation(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER);
String lat = String.valueOf(loc.getLatitude());
String longitude = String.valueOf(loc.getLongitude());
Toast.makeText(context, lat+","+longitude, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

If you want to request a new location, it is more code, and I will not cover that here. You can do some google searching or searching on here to find how to use it. The method you need is requestLocationUpdates or requestSingleUpdate. I'm guessing you would prefer requestSingleUpdate

Answer 2

I do not think that you can just make one call and get a location fix. GPS / Android just doesn't work that way. The phone may have a last known location, but that last known location may have been taken/recorded hours ago and miles away. The location returned by the getLastKnownLocation() method has a time stamp and an accuracy that can be used to see if the location is "good enough".

Locations are typically determined by setting up a listener, listening for updates and stopping the listener when you have a good enough fix. See Obtaining User Location for a good worked example, especially the details in the example isBetterLocation() method.

I find it best to create an Asynchronous task that actively registers and deregisters GPS/network/passive listeners depending on whether the application has a good enough location, or not, and have that class export a getMyPosition() method that returns a Location object if a good enough position has been established, or null if not. Then the main code can make a simple one line function call to get the current position. But only because there is an asynch task behind the scenes doing the hard work.

I try to make my asynch task actively deregister the GPS listener and turn off the GPS circuits to save battery live when I have a good enough fix. How long I turn off the listeners depends on the needs of the application. Leaving the passive listener left on (registered) allows my task/application to listen into the GPS position reports caused by any other application on the device "for free".

Getting a good enough position is not a one function call deal, unless you make it so with lots of behind the scenes work.