Detecting if you're in the main process or the remote service process in Application

Question

I have an application which has a remote service running in a separate process:

<service android:name=".MyService" android:process=":remote"/>

I'm also using an Application class:

<application android:label="@string/app_name" android:name=".MyApplication" ...

Can I do something like this?

public class MyApplication extends Application {

    public MyApplication() {
        if (isRemoteService()) {
            setupLog("remoteservice.log");
        } else {
            setupLog("application.log");
        }
    }

I'm thinking I could get the process name and use that to detect if I'm in the remote service or the main app, but I haven't found out how to get the process name. I can get the PID from android.os.Process.myPID(), but that doesn't help me much.

Answer 1

For example, if you want to check whether you are in main process, you can write code in your application like this:

public class MyApplication extends Application {
    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        //...code here will be execute in every process...
        if (isMainProcess()) {
            //...code here will be execute only in main process
        }
        super.onCreate();
    }

    // your package name is the same with your main process name
    private boolean isMainProcess() {
        return getPackageName().equals(getProcessName());
    }

    // you can use this method to get current process name, you will get
    // name like "com.package.name"(main process name) or "com.package.name:remote"
    private String getProcessName() {
        int mypid = android.os.Process.myPid();
        ActivityManager manager = (ActivityManager) getSystemService(Context.ACTIVITY_SERVICE);
        List<RunningAppProcessInfo> infos = manager.getRunningAppProcesses();
        for(RunningAppProcessInfo info : infos) {
            if (info.pid == mypid) {
                return info.processName;
            }
        }
        // may never return null
        return null;
    }
}

Answer 2

I can offer an indirect solution:

Within each of the respective StartUp methods, set a System Property:

System.setProperty("PROCESS_TYPE","SERVICE");
System.setProperty("PROCESS_TYPE","RECEIVER");
System.setProperty("PROCESS_TYPE","ACTIVITY");

The Properties are static, isolated to the process, and can be reached from everywhere. Added benefit is they can be directly used by logging frameworks like Logback.