Android Intent

Intents are objects of the android.content.Intent type. Your code can send them to the Android system defining the components you are targeting. For example, via the startActivity() method you can define that the intent should be used to start an activity. An intent can contain data via a Bundle.

An Intent provides a facility for performing late runtime binding between the code in different applications. Its most significant use is in the launching of activities, where it can be thought of as the glue between activities. It is basically a passive data structure holding an abstract description of an action to be performed.

An intent is an abstract description of an operation to be performed. It can be used with startActivity to launch an Activity, broadcastIntent to send it to any interested BroadcastReceiver components, and startService(Intent) or bindService(Intent, ServiceConnection, int) to communicate with a background Service.

There are two primary forms of intents you will use.

• Explicit Intents have specified a component (via setComponent(ComponentName) or setClass(Context, Class)), which provides the exact class to be run. Often these will not include any other information, simply being a way for an application to launch various internal activities it has as the user interacts with the application.
• Implicit Intents have not specified a component; instead, they must include enough information for the system to determine which of the available components is best to run for that intent.