Communication with services

1. Options for communication

There are several possibilities for an activity to communicate with a service and vice versa. This section discusses the possible approaches and provides recommendation which to use.

2. Using Intent data

In a simple scenario no direct communication is required. The service receives the intent data from the starting Android component and performs its work. No notification is necessary. For example, in case the service updates a content provider, the activity is notified by the content provider and no extra step in the service is necessary. This approach works for local and services running in their own process.

3. Using receiver

You can also use broadcast events and registered receivers for the communication. For example, your activity can dynamically register a broadcast receiver for an event and the service sends outs corresponding events. This is a very typical scenario, in which the service need to signal to the activity that his processing has finished.

This communication flow is depicted in the following graphic.

Android provides the LocalBroadcastManager class in the support library v4. This is a helper class to register for and send broadcasts of Intents to local objects within your process. This approach improves security as the broadcast events are only visible within your process and is faster than using standard events.

This approach works for local and services running in their own process.

4. Activity binding to local service

If the service is started in the same process as the activity, the activity can directly bind to the service. This is a relatively simple and efficient way to communicate and recommended for activities which need to have a fast communication layer with the service.

This approach works for local services.

5. Handler and ResultReceiver or Messenger

If the service should be communicating back to the activity, it can receive an object of type Messenger via the Intent data it receives from the activity. If the Messenger is bound to a Handler in the activity, the service can send objects of type Message to the activity.

A Messenger is parcelable, which means it can be passed to another process and you can use this object to send Messages to the Handler in the activity.

Messenger also provides the method getBinder() which allows passing a Messenger to the activity. The activity can therefore send Messages to the service.

This approach works for local services running in their own process.

6. AIDL for services in a different process

To bind to a service which runs in a different process, you need to use Inter Process Communication (IPC) as the data needs to be sent between different processes. To do so, you need to create a AIDL file which looks similar to a Java interface, but ends with the .aidl file extension and is only allowed to extend other AIDL files.

This approach is required if you need to bind to a service running in another process, i.e., if your service is consumed by other Android applications.

You can find more information about this approach in the http://developer.android.com/guide/components/aidl.html- Android developer documentation about AIDL.