Pass data to onDestroy() of Service

Question

I want to know if the service was terminated from a particular activity, so I'm passing a string from that activity while calling stopServivce(service).

Here's the code :

Intent service = new Intent(Activity.this,
                        service.class);
                service.putExtra("terminate", "activity terminated service");
                stopService(service);

But I can seem to access this variable with getIntent().getExtras().getString("terminate); in the onDestroy() method.

[EDIT]

I found a way around this obstacle, but I'd like my question to still be answered. I just did whatever I had to do in the onDestroy() method in the activity and then called stopService(service). I was lucky that my situation didn't need anything more complicated.

Answer 1

There is no way of accessing the Intent in onDestroy. You have to signal the service some other way (Binder, Shared Preferences, Local Broadcast, global data, or Messenger). A nice example of using broadcast is given in this answer. You can also get this to work by calling startService instead of stopService. startService only starts a new services if one does not already exist, so multiple calls to startService is mechanism yo send Intents to the service. You see this trick is use by BroadcastReceivers. Since you have access to the Intent in onStartCommand, so you can implement termination by check the Intent extras and calling stopSelf if instructed to terminate. Here is a sketch of it in action --

public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) {
        final String terminate = intent.getStringExtra("terminate");

        if(terminate != null) {
            // ... do shutdown stuff
            stopSelf();
        }
        return START_STICKY;
    }