What is Intent and Intent Filters in Android?

Intent and Intent Filters in Android are very important concepts that you need to understand as an Android developer in order to create applications that can be used on different devices, such as smartphones and tablets, with different versions of the Android operating system (OS), such as Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich. In this article, I’ll be explaining what they are, how they differ from each other, and when you should use them. Let’s get started! One of the most important concepts to understand when building Android apps, the difference between intent and intent filter are terms that get thrown around a lot but rarely explained in detail, leaving developers confused and irritated. That’s because it’s really easy to get confused about what these terms mean and how they work together in an app.

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So today we’re going to dive into everything you need to know about the difference between intent and intent filters in Android, so you can stop getting frustrated and start building amazing applications with them! Ever wonder what the difference between these two is? With Intents and Intent Filters in Android, you can send data from one application to another, and even execute code in other applications from within your own app! The key to both of these concepts is that they allow you to share information between apps in order to accomplish a certain task. But if you’re new to this, it can be difficult to determine how they work, when they’re necessary, and how they differ from each other. Today we’ll be going over everything you need to know about Intents and Intent Filters in Android.

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Introduction

An intent is a message that can be passed between activities, services, or broadcast receivers. They’re a key part of how Android works, but they can be confusing if you’re new to the platform. In this post, we’ll demystify intents and explain how they work. We’ll also cover intent filters, which dictate what sorts of intents your component can respond to. By the end of this post, you should have a good understanding of how intents and intent filters work in Android. The next time someone tells you an app needs permission to access location data on Android, for example, you’ll know what’s going on. It turns out that the term intent has two meanings: first, it’s a way of passing messages around within an app; second, it’s something that apps can register as being able to handle (more on this below). The only difference between these definitions is their scope. Broadly speaking, when we talk about intent in this blog post, we mean an object that represents a request to do something. A single intent object can include information about what action you want to take and what components are required to perform the action. For instance, let’s say your app wants to send an email with attachments – one intent could represent this request by including details like subject line, recipients list, etc., as well as the MIME type of each attachment file (image/png vs. video/mp4).

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Building an intent

Intents are a core part of Android development, allowing developers to communicate between different parts of the operating system. Intent can be used to start an activity, send a broadcast, or start a service. Intents can also be used to pass data between different parts of the operating system. As with most other aspects of programming for Android, there is more than one way to do this; some intents can be defined in line with their target component (which we’ll cover later), while others need a little more work. Inline intents: Creating an inline intent means creating it as you need it – but this has limitations too! For example, if you want to create an alarm clock app that lets users set their alarm time by selecting a song from their library, then this would require two separate intents: one for opening the music player and one for setting the alarm time. The second intent would need to know what song you selected so that it could find the alarm time within that specific song. It’s not possible to store this information in an inline intent without writing code to process it. It’s much easier just to use two separate intents instead since they’re designed for this purpose anyway. Notification of which method was invoked: One thing that might happen when you’re building an application is that your activities will change based on which method was invoked – for example, your login screen might show up after someone enters their username and password successfully instead of before they’ve entered anything at all. To make sure your application reacts appropriately when the user logs in successfully, you need to specify how it should react when called with each possible combination of methods – like showMainActivity, showLoginActivity, showErrorActivity etcetera.

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Types of intent

There are two types of intent in Android: explicit and implicit. Explicit intent specifies the component to start by name (or by its fully qualified class name). Implicit intent does not name a specific component but instead declares a general action to perform, which allows a component from another app to handle it. The four components that can receive an implicit intent are Activity, Service, Broadcast Receiver, and Content Provider. In order for an application to handle the intent, it must be registered with the system as being able to do so. Registration is done through registering explicit intent filters; these filters tell Android what kinds of intents they want the application to respond to. Intent filters provide a description of when and how your application will process given intents, allowing you control over what you want your application to do when different intents are sent to it. Intent filters use actions as qualifiers on how they want their applications processed. For example, if they want their applications used for viewing images then they would add ACTION_VIEW as one of their qualifiers for a filter type in their manifest file.

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Background and Definitions

An intent is a message that can be passed between different parts of an Android app or between different apps. Intents can be used to start activities, pass data, launch services, or broadcast messages. They are a key part of how Android apps work. An intent filter is a way for an app to say that it can handle certain types of intents. When an app registers an intent filter, it tells the system what kinds of intents it can handle and what kind of data they contain. The system then uses this information to match intents with the right app. If the app doesn’t register any intent filters, it won’t get any intents at all! The manifest file lets you set up both your own intents and those from other apps. Yours go into the application element inside the manifest file, while third-party ones go into their own elements outside of yours. It’s worth noting that if you have multiple activity classes in your application, each will need its own corresponding entry within your application element’s intent filters so that when your user selects an action on one screen of your app (e.g., tapping on Settings), all subsequent screens will inherit these settings changes by default.

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The Interface

An intent is a message that can be sent between two activities, or even within the same activity. They’re a key part of how Android apps communicate with each other. For example, if you share an item on Facebook from your favorite news app, the Facebook app will get an Intent telling it that there’s something new to show on your feed. The shared data will go into an Intent object (called extras) and then this will go into another Intent object which is called an intent. What’s so special about intents? When the intents are put together, they create an action. What does this mean? It means that intents can call multiple actions at once! Intents are like Lego blocks for Android apps: they fit together and build something bigger when used properly. So what are Intent Filters? These filters help categorize different types of intents and choose which app to respond to them. For instance, if you want to post on Facebook but don’t have the Facebook app installed, but have installed Chrome browser instead, your device will see that Chrome has an intent filter set up for handling posts made through a browser. And because it matches the criteria (i.e., posting), Chrome gets notified and offers to handle posting through its own interface rather than opening up the Facebook app.

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Where and how to use Intent Fiters

An intent filter is an expression in an app’s manifest file that specifies the type of intent that the component would like to receive. When you create an intent filter for your app, you can specify the kinds of intents that an activity, service, or broadcast receiver can respond to. For example, by creating an intent filter for an activity, you make it possible for other apps to start your activity with a certain kind of intent. Then, when such intent is sent, the system starts your activity and delivers it the intent. If the intent filters you set up a conflict with one another, then the system will sort them out so that only compatible intents are delivered to your component. The most common way to use intent filters is as part of specifying permissions for different activities within your app: if you want to allow other apps on the device to send certain types of content directly into a specific activity within your app (for instance, displaying pictures taken in another camera app), then you need an intent filter on that activity specifying what content types are allowed. If any other application tries to send content into this particular activity but doesn’t have permission specified via its own package manager (a topic we’ll cover more later), then it will be prevented from starting up this restricted part of your application.

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Target Classes and Resources

An intent is a message that can be sent between Android components. Intents can be used to start activities, send broadcasts, or start services. They can also be used to deliver data between activities. An intent filter is an expression in an app’s manifest file that specifies the type of intents that the component would like to receive. If an app component declares an intent filter for a certain action, it will only receive intents with that action. The following code snippet shows how to declare an intent filter for an activity
Some sample scenarios where we might use intents are:
These scenarios highlight some of the limitations you’ll run into when using rawIntent . When implementing these scenarios using rawIntent , you need to take care about:
The correct way of doing all these tasks is by using PendingIntent . By using PendingIntent s whenever required, you can leverage existing features within Android framework.

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Conclusion

An intent is an abstract description of an operation to be performed. It can be used with startActivity to launch an Activity, broadcast intent to send it to any interested BroadcastReceiver components, and startService or bindService to communicate with a background Service. An IntentFilter can be used to declare the capabilities of a component – what an activity or service can do and what types of broadcasts it can handle. When you register a receiver for a particular event, the system checks whether there are any components that have declared themselves as being able to handle that event and if so, starts them up and delivers the event. The key point about IntentFilters is that they tell other applications about your component’s capabilities. Android registers its services at boot time using this mechanism and many apps also use it for their own components. If you want to share your services with other apps on the device, this might be something worth doing as well. If you are interested to learn new skills, the Entri app will help you to acquire them very easily. Entri app is following a structural study plan so that the students can learn very easily. If you don’t have a  background, it won’t be a problem. You can download the Entri app from the google play store and enroll in your favorite course.

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