Catching Android Broadcast Intents from within Toga

[mborus]

Hi,

I'm writing a Toga App targetting Andriod (version 15)

The device has some hardware that sends an intent when I push a button to scan a bar code.
The intent is "com.example.EVENT" and I need to access "EXTRA_EVENT_DECODE_VALUE" of the type byte array of this event.

When connecting the device via USB cable, I can verify that the intent fires, because it shows up on the
ADB command "adb logcat -v time ActivityManager:I Broadcast*:I *:S | findstr /i "com.example.EVENT" (Windows findstr is similar to grep on Linux)

I have some example Java code on how to access the Intent data. I had some help and we ran Java code on the device that caught the intent. Alas I'm not an Andriod/Java expert and have failed to catch this Intent via Chaquopy so far and to make the code work with Toga on Android.

I'm looking for hints on how to catch the Intent or
how to add the Java code so I can access the data via getLastScanBytes.

This is the java code we used in testing

package com.example.scannerlib;

import android.content.BroadcastReceiver;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.content.IntentFilter;
import android.os.Build;

public class ScannerBridge {

    private static byte[] lastScanBytes;

    public static void registerScannerReceiver(Context context) {
        IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter();
        filter.addAction("com.example.EVENT");
        filter.addCategory("android.intent.category.DEFAULT");

        context.registerReceiver(new BroadcastReceiver() {
            @Override
            public void onReceive(Context ctx, Intent intent) {
                if (intent.hasExtra("EXTRA_EVENT_DECODE_VALUE")) {
                    lastScanBytes = intent.getByteArrayExtra("EXTRA_EVENT_DECODE_VALUE");
                }
            }
        }, filter,
        Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.TIRAMISU ? Context.RECEIVER_EXPORTED : 0);
    }

    public static byte[] getLastScanBytes() {
        return lastScanBytes;
    }
}

[mhsmith]

It looks like it should be possible to write equivalent Python code with Chaquopy. Here are the main points:

• The Android Context can be accessed as app._impl.native, where app is your toga.App object.
• BroadcastReceiver is an abstract class with a zero-argument constructor, so it can be subclassed using the static_proxy decorator.
• You'll also need to edit your build.gradle file to pass the containing Python module to the static proxy generator. You can do this by adding a build_gradle_extra_content setting to your pyproject.toml file, then rerunning briefcase create android.

[mborus]

Thanks for the comment. I had problems trying to find out how to use Java within Toga at all.
I'll try to get a simple Hello-World style example running to see if I can access anything via static_proxy. If I'm successful with this quest, I'll post the code here.