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I am building an application which triggers an alarm via AlarmManager.

I would like to be able to call the Alarm via it's own non-activity class, but since I am not extending Activity, I don't appear to have any 'context'. This concept confuses me, and I've read the sdk docs.

How would I go about using:

alarmTest = (AlarmManager)getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);

in my non-activty class?

Also, I'm assuming getting context will allow me to use SharedPrefs and Intents in my non-activity class as well?

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4 Answers 4

up vote 19 down vote accepted

You can pass the context to the non-activity class which is the preferred way or you could encapsulate the base context of the application to a singleton which would allow you to access the context anywhere within the application. At some cases this might be a good solution but in others its certainly not a good one.

Anyway, if you want to trigger an alarm via the AlarmManager I'm pretty sure the alarm should inherit from a Service or better yet from IntentService and in such cases you have access to the context via this.getBaseContext() or this.getApplicationContext()

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Service and Activity inherit from Context - so when you are calling getSystemService in these classes, you are really calling super.getSystemService.

If you want to have a Context available in another class, you can pass one as an argument to a method of that class, keep a reference to it, etc.

Edit: Code sample. But seriously, it is extremely basic - if you understand inheritance and methods.

class MyActivity extends Activity { // Activity extends Context, so MyActivity also extends Context
  void someMethod() {
    MyOtherClass instance = new MyOtherClass();
class MyOtherClass {
  static void useStaticContext(Context context) {
  void useInstanceContext(Context context) {
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I think I understand what you mean. Would you happen to know where I could find sample code of this in a repo? Thanks! –  eportermd Nov 10 '10 at 5:53

You can try the following, it allows you to get the current context the view is running through.

alarmTest = (AlarmManager)this.getContext().getSystemService(Context.ALARM_SERVICE);
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You need to pass a context into the non-activity class.

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