使用cca Google Chrome应用时，从后台服务中触发Chrome警报

Question

Experimenting with Mobile Chrome apps API: ( https://github.com/MobileChromeApps/mobile-chrome-apps )

What I'm trying to achieve is the registering of my chrome alarms without having to crudely start the apps' main activity as this causes a bad user experience.

The challenge: I have specified a chome.alarm which gets successfully registered when I open the app ('cca run android ' for example). These alarms are specified in a background.js file, which is declared as a background script in the manifest.json file.

I wanted these to be registered automatically on boot, therefore I implemented a background service and thought I could simply call the app to register the alarms specified in the background.js file. However, the only way I can find thus far to achieve this, is via a call to launch the apps main activity via an Intent from within the background service as explained in more detail below.

On boot , my background service simply invokes:

//Launch main activity..
Intent LaunchIntent = getPackageManager().getLaunchIntentForPackage("com.company.appname");
startActivity(LaunchIntent);

The above launches the app into its main activity and the aforementioned chrome.alarms are registered as desired. Happy days! A massive downside to this, of course, is that no user wants the full blown main activity window to open on boot.

Please advise if there is a less clunky way to have the chrome.alarm specified in background.js registered at boot by a background thread. I do not wish to open the mainActivity of the app, yet this is currently the only way thus far I can see to get them to be registered. It is preferable not to register these alarms from within the Android SDK as I intend to stay as close to using web APIs and want to use background.js as the hook to do this keeping things in-line with chrome web apps as-well-as the android platform.

What I have done:

A cca (chrome mobile web app) app which registers a background service natively (I extend BackgroundService) as a plugin and register this to run at boot time. This is the only 'native android code' in order to load the app at boot-time.

Upon booting android, this background service then simply issues a startActivity(LaunchIntent) in order to open the app. In doing so, my chrome.alarm specified in my background.js file get registered successfully. If I don't do this, my chrome alarm specified in background.js do not get registered until I manually open the apps main activity. Therefore I use the backgroundService to open the apps main activity. This is not at all ideal, I would simply like to somehow have my chrome.alarms registered without crudely having to launch the apps main activity window.

Is there a call which I can place in my BackgroundService to have only the chrome.alarms contained in my background.js file read and registered to fire? Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

First, thanks for using Chrome Apps for Mobile! (Note: I work on the project)

Sorry that our current bootstrap is "crude" and "clunky", and we agree that it is. You can track this issue for progress on our effort to replace our current Background-scripts-embedded-in-main-Activity-webview strategy with a real background service and multiple window support. Basically you've summarized exactly our plan and existing limitations.

This work is actually scheduled for the near term, and will certainly be done before the end of the year.

As well as chrome.alarms , this feature is quite important for chrome.gcm and chrome.tcpServer (among other reasons).