Few days ago I read that there is a better mechanism for sending broadcasts within single application - the LocalBroadcastManager.
It works well (just like standard broadcasts..). However, yesterday I've found out that it cannot send broadcasts to receivers, which are defined in the manifest (when I temporarily switched it to use the standard Activity's sendBroadcast method, it worked).
The reason why I want this (and correct me if there is a more preferred way to do it) is:
Lets's say I want to download a file. I will use a service, because that's how Android wants us to do. OK, now I want to display (and periodically update) its progress in my activity. So service will be sending broadcasts to my activity and the activity has to register to receive them. The preferred way to handle broadcasts is to register in onResume() and unregister in onPause(). Now let's imagine that the user is bored with the slowly moving progressbar, so he presses Home and goes to do something else. Later he comes back and wants to see the current status of the download, but how can I tell him, when I unregistered from broadcasts that second he left my application?
That's why I use a receiver defined in the manifest, to be always ready to receive the broadcast and store it permanently (shared preferences, database...), so the activity can reconstruct the latest broadcast when it becomes visible.
However now I'm not sure, whether this routine is not recommended, or why the LocalBroadcastManager is not allowing me to do it.
