CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidsms
Peri Hartman
Peri Hartman

Reputation: 19484

Are PendingIntent names for sms aribtrary?

Pretty much all the examples I find for sending an SMS message define the strings

String SENT = "SMS_SENT";
String DELIVERED = "SMS_DELIVERED";

where PendingIntents are formed like this:

PendingIntent sentIntent = PendingIntent.getBroadcast (this, 0, new Intent(SENT), 0);
PendingIntent deliveryIntent = PendingIntent.getBroadcast (this, 0, new Intent(DELIVERED0), 0);

ultimately for the calls

sms.sendTextMessage (phoneNumber, null, message, sentIntent, deliveryIntent);

or (using an array of them)

sms.sendMultipartTextMessage (phoneNumber, null, parts, sentIntents, deliveredIntents);

Are these strings arbitrary? The best I can tell is that you simply need to filter for them in your BroadcastReceiver, but it doesn't matter what the actual strings are. Is that true?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 96

Answers (1)

Martin Cazares
Martin Cazares

Reputation: 13705

Yes, that's true, since you are actually creating the Intent, all you have to do is to make sure that the action specified in the Intent matches the one in the IntentFilter when creating your broadcast receiver. You should take on count that a pending intent has internally no difference from a regular intent, except that will be executed after some time and even when application's process is killed, the PendingIntent itself will remain usable from other processes that have been given it

This is the important part of them taken from android documentation:

A PendingIntent itself is simply a reference to a token maintained by the system describing the original data used to retrieve it. This means that, even if its owning application's process is killed, the PendingIntent itself will remain usable from other processes that have been given it. If the creating application later re-retrieves the same kind of PendingIntent (same operation, same Intent action, data, categories, and components, and same flags), it will receive a PendingIntent representing the same token if that is still valid, and can thus call cancel() to remove it.

Because of this behavior, it is important to know when two Intents are considered to be the same for purposes of retrieving a PendingIntent. A common mistake people make is to create multiple PendingIntent objects with Intents that only vary in their "extra" contents, expecting to get a different PendingIntent each time. This does not happen. The parts of the Intent that are used for matching are the same ones defined by Intent.filterEquals. If you use two Intent objects that are equivalent as per Intent.filterEquals, then you will get the same PendingIntent for both of them.

But going back to your question, you can specify any action without any problem as long as the action do not match other actions registered for another broadcastreceiver and even so, it should match in action as well as meta data, so chances that something like that happen are quiet low Hope this Helps..

Regards!

Upvotes: 2

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