Passing data to main activity is lost

Question

That issue took me few days of head-banging with no avail. In short I have two Activities for sake of the example I'll call them MainActivity and SearchActivity. The MainActivity has a button that takes you to a search screen which is the SearchActivity and there I have a button with preset value that I want to pass back to the MainActivity. So far so good. I click the button in debugger I can see my extra values and next breakpoint is in the onCreate in MainActivity when I get the extras there is nothing, none, all gone. SO here is the important part, the code:

MainActivity.class

public class MainActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);


        btnSearch.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
            @Override
            public void onClick(View v) {
                Intent search = new Intent(v.this, SearchActivity.class);
                startActivityForResult(search, SEARCH_VIDEO_REQUEST);
            }
        });
    }

    protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
        if (requestCode == SEARCH_VIDEO_REQUEST) {
            if (resultCode == RESULT_OK) {
                String url = data.getExtras().getString("VIDEO_URL");
                if (url != null) {
                    txtUrl.setText(url);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

SearchActivity.class

public class SearchActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        btnSend.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            public void onClick(View v) {
                String videoUrl = "http://video-url.com";
                Intent data = new Intent(SearchActivity.this, MainActivity.class);
                data.putExtra("VIDEO_URL", videoUrl);
                setResult(RESULT_OK, data);
                finish();
            }
        });
    }
}

AndroidManifest.xml

<activity
    android:name="com.project.MainActivity"
    android:label="@string/app_name"
    android:configChanges="keyboardHidden|orientation|screenSize"
    android:theme="@android:style/Theme.Black.NoTitleBar"
    android:screenOrientation="portrait">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER"/>
    </intent-filter>
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.SEND"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
        <data android:mimeType="text/plain"/>
    </intent-filter>
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.MEDIA_MOUNTED"/>
        <data android:scheme="file"/>
    </intent-filter>
</activity>
<activity
    android:name="com.project.SearchActivity"
    android:label="@string/app_name"
    android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar"
    android:screenOrientation="portrait">
</activity>

Answer 1

The problem is with the class returning the result.

As Mikel points out in another answer:

Intent(Context packageContext, Class cls) Added in API level 1

Create an intent for a specific component. All other fields (action, data, type, class) are null, though they can be modified later with explicit calls. This provides a convenient way to create an intent that is intended to execute a hard-coded class name, rather than relying on the system to find an appropriate class for you; see setComponent(ComponentName) for more information on the repercussions of this.

You aren't explicitly setting the data parameter as the documentation above states but instead attempting to add an Extra to a null Data object which fails.

Instead, I would change your class to the following:

public class SearchActivity extends Activity {
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
        btnSend.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {
            public void onClick(View v) {
                String videoUrl = "http://video-url.com";
                Intent data = new Intent();
                data.putExtra("VIDEO_URL", videoUrl);
                setResult(RESULT_OK, data);
                finish();
            }
        });
    }
}

This will initialize your Intent and allow you to add Extra data to it (this is also the normal way you would send back data, there isn't a need normally to send back a result which is tied to a specific Intent.