Notification Action without starting new Activity?

Question

I plan to have a heads up notification that has two Actions: one to Approve a login request and one to Decline a login request. By clicking on either of these actions I wish to fire off a HTTP request to my server and most importantly do not want to start a new Activity or have the user redirected to my app at all.

        Context context = getBaseContext();
    NotificationCompat.Builder mBuilder = new NotificationCompat.Builder(context)
            .setSmallIcon(R.mipmap.notificationicon)
            .setContentTitle(notificationTitle)
            .setContentText("Access Request for " + appName + " : " + otp)
            .setDefaults(Notification.DEFAULT_ALL)
            .setPriority(NotificationCompat.PRIORITY_HIGH)
            .addAction(R.drawable.ic_tick, "Approve", someApproveIntent?  );

Here is my notification builder and after looking around it seems that the addAction method is looking for a new/pendingIntent, which is confusing me as I cannot find any examples online where Intents do not lead to new Activities being fired off.

How would I implement some code (a method maybe) rather then starting a new Activity on each of my Actions?

Answer 1

If you don't want to start an activity you can also wrap a BroadcastReceiver or a Service directly in a PendingIntent.

Wherever you build your notification...

Your notification actions will start a service directly.

NotificationCompat.Builder builder = new NotificationCompat.Builder(context)...

Intent iAction1 = new Intent(context, MyService.class);
iAction1.setAction(MyService.ACTION1);
PendingIntent piAction1 = PendingIntent.getService(context, 0, iAction1, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT);

builder.addAction(iconAction1, titleAction1, piAction1);

// Similar for action 2.

MyService.java

IntentServices run in a row one after another. They do the work on a worker thread.

public class MyService extends IntentService {
  public static final String ACTION1 = "ACTION1";
  public static final String ACTION2 = "ACTION2";

  @Override
  public void onHandleIntent(Intent intent) {
    final String action = intent.getAction();
    if (ACTION1.equals(action)) {
      // do stuff...
    } else if (ACTION2.equals(action)) {
      // do some other stuff...
    } else {
      throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unsupported action: " + action);
    }
  }
}

AndroidManifest.xml

Don't forget to register the service in manifest.

<manifest>
  <application>
    <service
        android:name="path.to.MyService"
        android:exported="false"/>
  </application>
</manifest>