Sending Message From Intentservice To Activity

I have an activity and an intentService in the same application. The service must keep running after the activity ends so I do not want to bind. I have been googling for hours an

Solution 1:

You have to use Broadcast for this. You can sent broadcast message after finish the intent service.also you need to register your intentfilter inside your activity(where you want to receive the data)

This may be help you : http://www.mysamplecode.com/2011/10/android-intentservice-example-using.html

Solution 2:

For the record I'll answer my own question as it might be useful to others... (I'm using a regular Service, not an IntentService as it needs to stay active)

For the activity to receive messages from the service, it has to instantiate a Handler as so...

privateHandlerhandler=newHandler() 
{
    publicvoidhandleMessage(Message message) 
    {
        Objectpath= message.obj;

        if (message.arg1 == 5 && path != null)
        {
            StringmyString= (String) message.obj;
            Gsongson=newGson();
            MapPlotmapleg= gson.fromJson(myString, MapPlot.class);
            Stringastr="debug";
            astr = astr + " ";
        }
    };
};

The above code consists of my debug stuff. The service sends the message to the activity as so...

MapPlotmapleg=newMapPlot();
            mapleg.fromPoint = LastGeoPoint;
            mapleg.toPoint = nextGeoPoint;              
            Gsongson=newGson();
            StringjsonString= gson.toJson(mapleg); //convert the mapleg class to a json string
            debugString = jsonString;

            //send the string to the activityMessengermessenger= (Messenger) extras.get("MESSENGER");
            Messagemsg= Message.obtain();  //this gets an empty message object

            msg.arg1 = 5;
            msg.obj = jsonString;
            try
            {
                messenger.send(msg);
            }
            catch (android.os.RemoteException e1)
            {
                Log.w(getClass().getName(), "Exception sending message", e1);
            }               

I just picked the number 5, for now, as the message identifier. In this case I'm passing a complex class in a json string and then reconstrucing it in the activity.