Start Android Service after every 5 minutes

Question

I was searching over the internet for last 2 days but I couldn't find any tutorial helpful. I have created a service and I am sending a notification in status bar when the service starts. I want that service to stop after showing the notification and start it again after 5 minutes. Please let me know if it is possible and provide me some helpful tutorials if you have any. I heard of TimerTask and AlarmManager and I tried to use them as well but I wasn't able to get the desired result.

EDIT: I need the service to be started every 5 minutes even if my application is not running.

Answer 1

You do not want to use a TimerTask since this depends on your application running continuously. An AlarmManager implementation makes it safe for your application to be killed between executions.

Stating that you tried to use AlarmManager but did not get the desired result is not a helpful statement, in that it tells no one how to help you to get it right. It would be much more useful to express what happened.

http://web.archive.org/web/20170713001201/http://code4reference.com/2012/07/tutorial-on-android-alarmmanager/ contains what appears to be a useful tutorial on AlarmManager. Here are the salient points:

1) Your alarm will cause an Intent to fire when it expires. It's up to you to decide what kind of Intent and how it should be implemented. The link I provided has a complete example based on a BroadcastReceiver.

2) You can install your alarm with an example such as:

public void setOnetimeTimer(Context context) {
    AlarmManager am=(AlarmManager)context.getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);
    Intent intent = new Intent(context, AlarmManagerBroadcastReceiver.class);
    intent.putExtra(ONE_TIME, Boolean.TRUE);
    PendingIntent pi = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 0, intent, 0);
    am.set(AlarmManager.RTC_WAKEUP, System.currentTimeMillis() + (1000 * 60 * 5), pi);
}