I'm certainly not suggesting that making intents visible would be a complete solution to the swampy problem.
But, it would bring some useful clarity into the world, and reduce the confusion and randomness that comes out of the methods developers are using right now. At the very least, it would make it easier to pick the intent that *looked* most like a general-purpose interface to a particular app. I had also had your thought about a flag to mark intent filters as private, which would be a handy hint. The mechanism that you & Dar have suggested are both appealing ideas, but they put an additional responsibility on the developers to publish the interface information, which might mean they would not get much momentum. I guess I am looking for something simpler, which will not require us to persuade all the developers in the world to be more organised and also which will not require us to persuade Dianne to redesign the platform... :-) R. On Feb 2, 2:04 pm, Peli <peli0...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > > The effect is that there is is no good distinction between 'private' > > and 'public' interfaces, since all intents are equally visible [...] > > Just being able to see the intent filters of other apps > > would be a huge help. > > I doubt that this would be the solution you look for. If your > application saw them, it would still not know whether it is some > 'private' or 'public' interface, and whether the developer would > change them without notice. > > Now, you may say, there could be another tag in the intent filter that > says "this is a private intent filter" or "this is a public intent > filter". And of course, your application would only read and use the > public intent filters - right? > > But what about those developers who forget to set the "public" tag in > their intent filter? (and wouldn't setting the "public" tag be as easy > or difficult as writing documentation in the first place?) > > I can propose the following solution: We can introduce a new intent: > ACTION_GET_INTENT_FILTERS. > Applications can implement this to make information about their public > intents - well -public. Information about intents, extras, including > description, etc. is all passed back to the calling activity in the > intent extras. > > Any application that would like to participate, could then provide > their information in machine-readable form to other compatible > applications. > > Use case would be an application that could call very different > intents on the system, depending on some condition or event (e.g. > similar to Locale), and the user could select an arbitrary intent > beforehand from the list of public intents. > > Would this be a solution that you would like to support? If yes, we > should discuss an appropriate format for the extras, and we could > start by implementing it in the OI applications. > > Peliwww.openintents.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
