Android Application Development : Initialization Parameters in AndroidManifest.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    package="com.microjobsinc.mjandroid" android:versionCode="1" 
      android:versionName="1.0">
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />
    <uses-permission android:name=
      "android.permission.ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CALL_PHONE" />  
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_MOCK_LOCATION" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

    <application android:icon="@drawable/icon2">
    <uses-library android:name="com.google.android.maps" />
        <activity android:name=".MicroJobs" android:label="@string/app_name">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>

					  

The MicroJobs Activity is identified in the manifest at the beginning of the file. This part of the file is normally created in Eclipse when you first create the Project that you use to write your application.

Like all good XML files, line 1 has the standard declaration of the XML version and the character encoding used. Before we get into the Activities that make up the MJAndroid application, we define a few parameters and declare needed permissions for the whole application:

package="com.microjobsinc.mjandroid"

This is just the package name we gave when we created the application in Eclipse. It’s also the default package for all the modules in the application.

android:versionCode

This is an integer that should always increment with each new version of the application. Every application should include a version code, and it should always be a monotonically increasing integer from version to version. This lets other programs (such as Android Market, installers, and launchers) easily figure out which is the latest version of an application. The filename of your .apk file should include this same version number, so it is obvious which version it contains.

android:versionName

This version identifier is a string, and it is intended to be more like the version numbers you usually see for applications. The naming convention is up to you, but generally the idea is to use a scheme like m.n.o (for as many numbers as you want to use), to identify successive levels of change to the application. The idea is that this is the version identifier that would be displayed to a user (either by your application or another application).

<uses-permission android:name=...

There are four of these in MJAndroid, and they declare that the application intends to use features of Android that require explicit permission from the user of the mobile device running the application. The permission is requested when the application is installed, and from then on Android remembers that the user said it was OK (or not) to run this application and access the secure features. There are many permissions already defined in Android, all described in the Android documentation (search for android.Manifest.permission). You can also define your own permissions and use them to restrict other applications’ access to functions in your application, unless the user grants the other application that permission. The permissions requested here are:

• ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, which is required to obtain location information from a GPS sensor.

• ACCESS_LOCATION_EXTRA_COMMANDS. The Android documentation doesn’t tell us which location commands are “extra,” so we’ll ask for all of them.

• CALL_PHONE. This allows MJAndroid to request that the Dialer place a mobile phone call on its behalf.

• ACCESS_MOCK_LOCATION, so we can get fake location information when we’re running under the emulator.

• INTERNET, so we can retrieve map tiles over an Internet connection.

android:icon="@drawable/icon2"

This is the filename for a PNG file that contains the icon you’d like to use for your application. In this case we’re telling the Android SDK to look for the icon file in the drawable subdirectory of the res (resources) directory under MJAndroid. Android will use this icon for your application in the Android Desktop.

Turning our attention to the definition for the first (and main) Activity, MicroJobs, we first define a few attributes for the Activity:

android:name

The name of the Activity. The full name of the Activity includes the package name (which in our application is “com.microjobsinc.mjandroid.MicroJobs”), but since this file is always used in the package’s namespace, we don’t need to include the leading package names. The Android SDK strips the package name down to “.MicroJobs” when it creates this part of AndroidManifest.xml, and even the leading period is optional.

android:label

The label that we want to appear at the top of the Android screen when the Activity is on the screen. We saw this before in HelloWorld, where we changed the string in strings.xml to match our application.

We then declare an intent filter that tells Android when this Activity should be run. As you’ll recall, when Android encounters an Intent to fulfill, it looks among the available Activities and Services to find something that can service the Intent. We set two attributes:

action

Right now Android is trying to launch this application, so it’s looking for an Activity that declares itself ready to resolve the MAIN action. Any application that is going to be launched by the Launcher needs to have exactly one Activity or Service that makes this assertion.

category

The Intent resolver in Android uses this attribute to further qualify the Intent that it’s looking for. In this case, the qualification is that we’d like for this Activity to be displayed in the User Menu so the user can select it to start this application. Specifying the LAUNCHER category accomplishes this. You can have a perfectly valid application without this attribute—you just won’t be able to launch it from the Android user interface. Normally, again, you’ll have exactly one LAUNCHER per application, and it will appear in the same intent filter as the opening Activity of your application.