Android: How to call function of Activity inside of tab from the tabhost

Question

I have a tabhost with three tabs. Each is an activity. I would like to have a button which is in the action bar, the bar along the top with common buttons, call functions of the tab which is active.

For example, an add function which could add something different to each tab depending on what tab was present when you clicked the button.

So, I am aksing how to call a function in Activity A from the tabHost.

And if that wont work, perhaps I can update the database from the tabhost and then refresh the tab content. Would that be easier?

Thank you all for you time and support.

Answer 1

Hi Just stumbled across this, not sure if you already found a solution?

I solved this myself recently. I was previously getting around the problem by raising a intent broadcast from the tabhost activity and receiving the broadcast within the sub tab activity. This worked for me but i was sure there is a "better" way.

A cleaner way is to achieve it with something like this:

might have something like this:

• parentActivity - my "container" activity which holds the TabHost
• childActivity - my tab activity which holds tab content and the public method i want to call from parentActivity

within parentActivity:

// a method used for onclick callback or whatever you need. within parentActivity (tabhost)
// this will get call huzzah() in the first tab - getChildAt(0)
onClick () {
  childActivity childAct = (childActivity) getTabHost().getChildAt(0).getContext();
  childAct.huzzah();
}

within childActivity:

// a public method for the parent activity to access
public void huzzah() {
  Log.d("stuff", "huzzah() called");
}

Note: Another alternative i believe is to redesign to use views instead of activities in your tabs. This is a better overall alternative because IIRC memory wise you are only storing 1 activity on the stack rather than (n * tabs) number of activities

Hope that helps