One of my favourite things about the Android platform is how easily application can share data using Intents and ContentProviders. They provide a universal basis for Android applications to interoperate and I try to expose them whenever it’s practical, even for something as singular as my Daisy Garden application.
I’ve just published a new version of Daisy Garden and with it, Intents and ContentProviders that enable the users of other Android applications to choose flowers they have grown in Daisy Garden — assuming that the developers choose to support it. And the great thing is that supporting third-party intents is very easy to do (and even if no other developers use them, they will be heavily used to integrate my own applications).
The Java code embedded below is a self-contained Activity that responds to a tap on the screen by inviting the user to pick a flower and then displaying the flower as a bitmap. There are two basic parts: forming an Intent for the user to pick a flower and forming a Uri to the flower’s bitmap. Both of these aspects can be customized; messaging to the user, and the bitmap size for example.
It’s very simple — more than half the code is boilerplate and comments. And this is what’s really good: in a well structured Android application this functionality is simple to expose too — I’d go as far as saying it’s almost automatic, so there is very little reason not to share (non-sensitive) data between applications.
Having said all this, there is an interesting technical detail here that meant that I had to give some thought to exposing the bitmaps. Daisy Garden is generating the flower bitmaps “on-the-fly” when they are requested from the ContentProvider and it’s not obvious how to share these unless you know a little about how Linux filesystems work. I’ll try to find some time to outline the technique in a subsequent post.
Java code follows:
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