How To Transfer The Firebase Reference To Another Android Activity

We have 2 Android activities (activity A and activity B) Suppose that we instantiated a Firebase reference in activity A. Activity A also handles all user authentication (Facebook,

Solution 1:

The common way to do this is to pass the URL for the data to the new activity. See for example this method from the Firebase Android Drawing sample:

privatevoidopenBoard(String key){
    Log.i(TAG, "Opening board "+key);
    Toast.makeText(BoardListActivity.this, "Opening board: "+key, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
    Intent intent = newIntent(this, DrawingActivity.class);
    intent.putExtra("FIREBASE_URL", FIREBASE_URL);
    intent.putExtra("BOARD_ID", key);
    startActivity(intent);
}

The new activity then reads the URL and constructs a new Firebase reference:

publicvoidonCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    Intentintent= getIntent();
    finalStringurl= intent.getStringExtra("FIREBASE_URL");
    finalStringboardId= intent.getStringExtra("BOARD_ID");
    Log.i(TAG, "Adding DrawingView on "+url+" for boardId "+boardId);
    mFirebaseRef = newFirebase(url);

The authentication state is indeed maintained between these calls. The Firebase SDK maintains a single connection to the server for an application session and each Firebase reference is a lightweight reference on top of that.