onServiceConnected never called after bindService method

android binding service speech-recognition
Matroska picture Matroska · Mar 21, 2010 · Viewed 43.8k times · Source

I have a particular situation: a service started by a broadcast receiver starts an activity. I want to make it possible for this activity to communicate back to the service. I have chosen to use AIDL to make it possible. Everything seems works good except for bindService() method called in onCreate() of the activity. bindService(), in fact, throws a null pointer exception because onServiceConnected() is never called while onBind() method of the service is. Anyway bindService() returns true. The service is obviously active because it starts the activity. I know that calling an activity from a service could sound strange, but unfortunately this is the only way to have speech recognition in a service.

Thanks in advance

Answer

KomodoDave picture KomodoDave · May 6, 2011

I've just experienced another version of this problem, with the same symptom of onServiceConnected(...) not being called. The cause was different in my case.

You must make sure to have a service declaration in your AndroidManifest.xml within the application tag - this was the root of the problem for me.

<application android:name=".YourAppTitle" android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name">
    <activity android:name=".Main" android:label="@string/app_name">
    </activity>
    <service android:name="YourService" />
</application>

There's an extra complication if you're using a separate Android library within Eclipse - adding this Service tag only seems to fix the issue if the referenced service is in the same package as the manifest; i.e. if your app is in package a.b.c and this is where AndroidManifest.xml resides, then 'YourService' must also be in package a.b.c. (manually copied from another library, if necessary) or else the <service..> tag may/will be ignored and onServiceConnected(...) still won't be called.

This was the case for my project even though I used a suitable import statement for the Service in my code. Eclipse showed no error, so the import was correctly identifying the class from another library in the Eclipse workspace.

HTH

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