multiple call to startforeground?

Question

i have created a service (EmailService) that sends email ... each time i need to send an email with my app, it starts the service and pass the id of the email via an intent...

i am using startforeground(id_of_email, mynotifcation); to prevent it from being killed and to show a notification to the user of the status of the email sending.

i need to allow the user to send multiple emails at the time, so when the user needs to send another email, it again calls startservice with a new intent(different id of email)...so it calls startforeground(new_id_of_email, mynotifcation); again.

the problem is that the new call to startforeground overwrites the previous notification... (so the user loses the previous notification and doesn't know what is going on with his previous email)

Answer 1

Looking at the Service.startForeground() source shows that multiple calls to startForeground will only replace the currently shown notification. In fact, the call to startForeground is identical to stopForeground(), only with removeNotification set always set to true.

If you wish for you service to display a notification for each email in progress, you will have to manage each notification individually from the service.

public final void startForeground(int id, Notification notification) {
    try {
        mActivityManager.setServiceForeground(
                new ComponentName(this, mClassName), mToken, id,
                notification, true);
    } catch (RemoteException ex) {
    }
}

public final void stopForeground(boolean removeNotification) {
    try {
        mActivityManager.setServiceForeground(
                new ComponentName(this, mClassName), mToken, 0, 
                null, removeNotification);
    } catch (RemoteException ex) {
    }
}

http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/ext/com.google.android/android/4.3_r1/android/app/Service.java#Service.startForeground%28int%2Candroid.app.Notification%29