android - Paho MQTT service for publishing

Question

I am new to Android and services. My aim is to be able to set-up subscriptions and do publications on topic strings. The topic strings and client ID are set-up after parsing input of text fields. I am using the Paho MQTT service (downloaded the source and built the JAR).

The following causes a Null Pointer Exception at c.publish(). The logcat shows the exception at the IMqttDeliveryToken publish(String topic, MqttMessage message, Object userContext, IMqttActionListener callback) method in MqttAndroidClient where a delivery token is being taken.

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

        // Set locale;
        l = getResources().getConfiguration().locale;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onResume() {
        super.onResume();
        addButtonListener();        
    }

    private void addButtonListener() {
        Button submitButton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.buttonSubmit);

        submitButton.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {
// ...
// validation code for fields in layout
// ...
// Finally, this.

                    MemoryPersistence mPer = new MemoryPersistence();
                    String clientId = UUID.randomUUID().toString();
                    String brokerUrl = "tcp://m2m.eclipse.org:1883";
                    MqttAndroidClient c = new MqttAndroidClient(getApplicationContext(), brokerUrl, clientId, mPer);
                    try {
                        c.connect(); 
                        String topic = "transfers/topic";
                        String msg = "topic payload"
                        MqttMessage m = new MqttMessage();
                        m.setPayload(msg.getBytes());
                        m.setQos(2);
                        m.setRetained(false);
                        c.publish(topic, m); 
                    } catch (MqttException e) {
                        Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(), e.getMessage(), Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
                    }

Can you please tell me how to use the service to publish and subscribe ? I did browse through the sample project (from Paho Android). The LWT and publish seems to be merged as the layout for LWT (activity_publish.xml) seems to be used for publication as well.

Answer 1

The NullPointerException is because connect() calls an asynchronous method and you need to implement an ActionListener. In case of success you could send messages.

Log.i(LOGTAG, "MQTT Start");

MemoryPersistence memPer = new MemoryPersistence();

final MqttAndroidClient client = new MqttAndroidClient(
    context, "tcp://192.168.0.13:1883", username, memPer);

try {
    client.connect(null, new IMqttActionListener() {

        @Override
        public void onSuccess(IMqttToken mqttToken) {
            Log.i(LOGTAG, "Client connected");
            Log.i(LOGTAG, "Topics="+mqttToken.getTopics());

            MqttMessage message = new MqttMessage("Hello, I am Android Mqtt Client.".getBytes());
            message.setQos(2);
            message.setRetained(false);

            try {
                client.publish("messages", message);
                Log.i(LOGTAG, "Message published");

                client.disconnect();
                Log.i(LOGTAG, "client disconnected");

            } catch (MqttPersistenceException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();

            } catch (MqttException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }

        @Override
        public void onFailure(IMqttToken arg0, Throwable arg1) {
            // TODO Auto-generated method stub
            Log.i(LOGTAG, "Client connection failed: "+arg1.getMessage());

        }
    });
}