Restart Android Service on Reboot of Phone

Recently in one of our project we have an android background service. Which we used to send some periodic updates to server. Later we identified an issue that the service was not restarted when phone restarts or switched off by low battery and power on again. In this blog I will explain you how to restart background service.

First of all you have to register a receiver for the device boot and power on action in your Android manifest file. This broadcast receiver will be invoked when this action happens. Following is the example code.

<receiver android:name=".BootCompletedIntentReceiver">

  <intent-filter>

    <action android:name="android.intent.action.BOOT_COMPLETED" />

            <action android:name="android.intent.action.QUICKBOOT_POWERON" />

    <action android:name="android.intent.action.ACTION_EXTERNAL_APPLICATIONS_AVAILABLE" />

  </intent-filter>

</receiver>

As you see above we have added BootCompletedIntentReceiver which is our broadcast receiver and added three actions.

BOOT_COMPLETED

QUICKBOOT_POWERON

ACTION_EXTERNAL_APPLICATIONS_AVAILABLE

BOOT_COMPLETED and QUICKBOOT_POWERON actions are invoked when phone powers on. ACTION_EXTERNAL_APPLICATIONS_AVAILABLE is required if your application is installed in external memory.

After that add following class to your project.

package com.mypackage.app;

import java.util.Calendar;

import android.app.PendingIntent;

import android.content.BroadcastReceiver;

import android.content.Context;

import android.content.Intent;

import com.mypackage.app.BackGroundService;

public class BootCompletedIntentReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {

@Override

public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {

// TODO Auto-generated method stub

Intent serviceIntent = new Intent(context,

BackGroundService.class);

PendingIntent pintent = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0,

                                serviceIntent, 0);

                Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();

                int interval = 5;

                interval = interval * 60 * 1000;

                PendingIntent pintent = PendingIntent.getService(getBaseContext(), 0,

                               serviceIntent, 0);

                AlarmManager alarm = (AlarmManager) getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);

                               alarm.setRepeating(AlarmManager.RTC_WAKEUP, cal.getTimeInMillis(),

                                interval, pintent);

}

}

As you can see in above code. We have added BootCompletedIntentReceiver which extends broadcast receiver. onReceive event is called when there is an action and in that event we are creating pending and service intent for our background service and set alarm to invoke service at regular interval. 

Hope this posts help you.

AngularJs Pass Data Between Controllers

Hello,

This is my first blog on AngularJs. I have been working with AngularJs since last three or four weeks and I am very excited about this Framework. It has nice features like two way data binding, templates, MVVM model, directives. That makes this framework super cool. I will be adding more blogs in future for AngularJs. In this blog I will explain how to pass data between controllers.

For this first we have to understand $rootScope. Every AngularJs application has one root scope and all other scopes are children of root scope. It's like application wide global variable.

Now lets see how we can use this to share data between controllers. First we need a service which is common in both controllers. We will invoke a service function from a controller which wants to send data. Service will broadcast it and using $rootScope. While the receiver controller will listen to the broadcast event and receives that data. First lets crete a service and function.

var servicesModule = angular.module('myapp.broadcastservice', []);

servicesModule.factory('BroadcastService', ['$http', '$rootScope', function ($http, $rootScope) {

   var service = {};
   service.sendData = function(data){

      $rootScope.$broadcast('message', data);
   }

}

Now lets create sender controller.

appRoot.controller('SenderController', ['$scope', 'BroadcastService',
   function ($scope, BroadcastService) {
        $scope.sendData = function(){
              BroadcastService.sendData("My Message");
        }
   }
]);

Now lets create a receiver controller

appRoot.controller('ReceiverController', ['$scope', 'BroadcastService',
    function ($scope, BroadcastService) {
        $scope.$on('message', function(response, data) {
            console.log(data);
       });
    }
]);

As you can see from sender controller we invoke service function and broadcast message with event message and in receiver controller we receive it by listening to message event using $scope.$on.

This way you can pass data between AngularJs controllers. Hope this post helps you.