Inform Activity from a BroadcastReceiver ONLY if it is in the foreground

Solution 1:

I believe that you're familiar with AlarmManager now (creating a new Alarm, register a receiver...) so I will not talk about that. Just give you a solution for your question.

Instead of registering a BroadcastReceiver in a class file and in manifest, you only create a new BroadcastReceiver in your activity, and then, register it in onResume method, and unregister it in onPause method, sth like this in your activity:

private BroadcastReceiver mIntentReceiver = new BroadcastReceiver() {
    @Override
    public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent) {
      //do something       
    }
};

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    setContentView(R.layout.main);

    mIntentFilter = new IntentFilter();
    mIntentFilter.addAction("your alarm action");
    ...
}

@Override
protected void onResume() {
registerReceiver(mIntentReceiver, mIntentFilter);
    ...
super.onResume();
}

@Override
protected void onPause() {
unregisterReceiver(mIntentReceiver);
    ...
super.onPause();
}

The receiver will only receive the alarm intent when your activity is in foreground :)

(Sorry if my English is not clear)

Solution 2:

So this is almost Bino's answer, but: instead of moving the receiver into the activity, use two receivers, with different Intents. The first one is your original alarm Intent, with a receiver registered in the manifest as you already have, and then that receiver sends a second broadcast intent, which is handled by a receiver registered by the activity as Bino says.

I've done this in my own timer project, on github. Here are the alarm receiver and the requery receiver. Hope that helps.