Start Activity from preferences.xml and get the result in onActivityResult

Question

It's a complement to this question.

I can launch the Activity but I also need to be able to get the result. How do I do it?

I tried overriding onActivityResult on my PreferencesActivity to no avail.

Am I missing some extra properties in the preferences.xml?

Answer 1

The cleanest solution that I know of is to listen to the click on the preference and launch the intent explicitly. This way onActivityResult will be called as usual.

Assuming that your intent-preference is defined in XML you can attach a listener to it like this (where 1234 is a request code for onActivityResult):

Preference pref = (Preference) findPreference("prefKey");
pref.setOnPreferenceClickListener(new Preference.OnPreferenceClickListener() {
  @Override
  public boolean onPreferenceClick(Preference preference) {
    startActivityForResult(preference.getIntent(), 1234);
    return true;
  }
});

Answer 2

Try overriding startActivity() in your PreferencesActivity class and make it call startActivityForResult() instead after checking that the intent is the one we are interested in, similar to the following (with 1234 as the request code):

public class PreferencesActivity {
    // ...

    @Override
    public void startActivity(Intent intent) {
        if (thisIsTheExpected(intent)) {
            super.startActivityForResult(intent, 1234);
        } else {
            super.startActivity(intent);
        }
    }

    @Override
    protected void onActivityResult(int reqCode, int resCode, Intent data) {
        if (reqCode == 1234) {
            // should be getting called now
        }
    }

    // ...
}

Depending on your needs, this could be simpler compared to adding several OnPreferenceClickListener in your code :)