Starting an ActivityRecognitionService from within another active Service

Question

I am having an issue getting my ActivityRecognition Service to remain running. I currently have a service (GService) that runs continuously in the background. I want to start the ActivityRecognition service within GService, and have the ActivityRecognition service broadcast the activity result back to GService. I am able to start the service and receive feedback that it is running, and I also get one result from the intent handler (no actual data), but never again.

Here is the section of code from my continuous service setting up the intent, pending intent:

@Override
public void onConnected(Bundle bundle) {
    Log.d(TAG, "onConnected - isConnected ...............: " + mGoogleApiClient.isConnected());
    startLocationUpdates();
    //start process to receive activity updates
    Intent intent = new Intent(this, DetectedActivitiesIntentService.class);
    PendingIntent mActivityRecognitionPendingIntent = PendingIntent.getService(this, 0, intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);
    ActivityRecognition.ActivityRecognitionApi.requestActivityUpdates(mGoogleApiClient, ActivityConstants.DETECTION_INTERVAL_MILLISECONDS_MOVING,
            mActivityRecognitionPendingIntent).setResultCallback(this);
    startService(intent);   // this should start the DetectedActivitiesIntentService

This is the Broadcast receiver within GService:

public class ActivityDetectionBroadcastReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {
    protected static final String TAG_AR = "ADRR";

    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent){
        //ArrayList<DetectedActivity> updatedActivities =
            //  intent.getParcelableArrayListExtra(ActivityConstants.ACTIVITY_EXTRA);
        //updateDetectedActivitiesList(updatedActivities);
        String action = intent.getAction();
        if(action.equals("com.gt.useractivity"))
        {
            Log.d(TAG_AR, "received broadcast from Activity service");
            // below line should grab the resulting string activity from the intent and log it.
            Log.d(TAG_AR, "activity is : " + intent.getExtras().getString(ActivityConstants.ACTIVITY_EXTRA));
        }
    }
}

Here is the ActivityRecognition Service code:

public class DetectedActivitiesIntentService extends IntentService {
protected static final String TAG = "ADIS";

/**
 * This constructor is required, and calls the super IntentService(String)
 * constructor with the name for a worker thread.
 */
public DetectedActivitiesIntentService() {
    // Use the TAG to name the worker thread.
    super(TAG);
    Log.d(TAG, "Activity service started....");
}

@Override
public void onCreate() {
    super.onCreate();
}

/**
 * Handles incoming intents.
 * @param intent The Intent is provided (inside a PendingIntent) when requestActivityUpdates()
 *               is called.
 */
@Override
protected void onHandleIntent(Intent intent) {
    if(ActivityRecognitionResult.hasResult(intent))
    {
        ActivityRecognitionResult result = ActivityRecognitionResult.extractResult(intent);
        Intent localIntent = new Intent(ActivityConstants.BROADCAST_ACTION);
        // Get the list of the probable activities associated with the current state of the
        // device. Each activity is associated with a confidence level, which is an int between
        // 0 and 100.

        ArrayList<DetectedActivity> detectedActivities = (ArrayList) result.getProbableActivities();

        // Log each activity.
        Log.i(TAG, "activities detected");
        for (DetectedActivity da: detectedActivities) {
            Log.i(TAG, ActivityConstants.getActivityString(da.getType()) + " " + da.getConfidence() + "%");
        }

        String activity = result.getMostProbableActivity().toString();  // get the activity and convert to string

        // Broadcast the list of detected activities.
        //localIntent.putExtra(ActivityConstants.ACTIVITY_EXTRA, detectedActivities);
        //localIntent.setAction("com.gt.useractivity");
        localIntent.putExtra(ActivityConstants.ACTIVITY_EXTRA, activity);   // set the activity string to be transmitted
        LocalBroadcastManager.getInstance(this).sendBroadcast(localIntent);
    }
    else{
        Log.d(TAG, "Intent had no activity data....");
    }
}

}

This Activity recognition sample is based from the Google Github sample.

All the examples I have found when using the PendingIntent is being called from a main activity, not from a service. I'm obviously doing something incorrect, but I can't figure it out. Any advice would be appreciated. I should also note that I have 2 broadcast receivers within my GService. I don't know if this would cause an issue or not.

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

It looks like I have solved the problem. I have a second intent within my GService used for broadcasting. From what I can tell from this thread (Pending intent works correctly for first notification but not for the rest) if there are multiple intents being used, they have to be unique. Thus, I added one line of code when declaring my intent intent.setAction(Long.toString(System.currentTimeMillis())); which is enough to differentiate it from the other intent to the system. Once I did that, I began to receive the Activity broadcasts from the intent service, as well as still receiving the location requests from within the GService routine.

Starting an ActivityRecognitionService from within another active Service

1 Answers1