Sending Data via Bluetooth
I'm a little confused about how to send data over a Bluetooth connection. In the Android API documentation, from the Bluetooth Chat example, the class BluetoothChat.java constructs a Handler object. Within there is a switch statement, and a MESSAGE_WRITE case. Do I need to implement similar code to send Strings over Bluetooth? A case statement for each String I want to send? In particular I want to send (name,value) pairs so I know what is sent and what it's value is. How do I implement this? If, following the example, I call BluetoothChatService.write(String.getBytes()) a bunch of times to send...? Then how would I know which strings are associated with which names? Please help.
Answer
I'm using Google's Protocol Buffers to send structured data over bluetooth connections in my Android app. protobuf takes care of figuring out how to serialize the message for you so that you only have to send a byte value (length of the message) and then the serialized message; the library takes care of unserializing the message on the other end and populating the fields of a custom object. Definitely take a look at it; it made the writing of a custom bluetooth socket protocol quite easy.