Downloading Data Using Intentservice - Lifecycle Changes

Tl;dr How to know when an IntentService has finished downloading upon returning to the Activity which listens to its result using a BroadcastReceiver? I'm moving to implementing d

Solution 1:

use sendStickyBroadcast to send a sticky broadcast. This broadcast is held by the system.

Solution 2:

I wasn't really convinced by using SharedPreferences, static variables and other 'hacky' solutions.

I did find however that you can supply a ResultReceiver - which is parcelable - which you can use to notify your task is finished. It receives a Handler to specify the thread the result is handled on.

The advantage of this, is that you can save the ResultReceiver during onSaveInstanceState. Using some clever tricks you can certainly make this work. I have created an experimental library which facilitates this tactic: https://github.com/nhaarman/Ergo