So far these are the things I would like to cover (I will add others when I discover them):
- Lifecycle
- gotchas
- Passing objects and values between Activities
- Saved instances
- How to test
- Configuration changes
- Starting an activity from a different app
- Intents and its filters
- Tasks and Back Stack
I will not do a tutorial here and put into my own words existing references about Android Activities. Instead I'll just put links here for my future reference. But it is a must that what I have put in here are already read (and digested).
- http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html
- http://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities.html
- http://developer.android.com/guide/components/activities.html#actstate
- http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/runtime-changes.html
- http://developer.android.com/training/basics/activity-lifecycle/index.html
- http://developer.android.com/guide/components/intents-filters.html
Some tidbits that I know now that I missed before:
- the
EditTextwidget saves any text entered by the user and theCheckBoxwidget saves whether it's checked or not. The only work required by you is to provide a unique ID (with theandroid:idattribute) for each widget you want to save its state. If a widget does not have an ID, then the system cannot save its state. - The system will not call onPause() and onStop() if finish() is called within the Activity's onCreate() method. In this case, onDestroy() is called right away.
- I should declare Intent's Extra constant strings with the full package name of my app
