How to handle Screen Lock & UnLock in Android ?

First, unlike other broad casted intents, for Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_OFF and Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_ON you CANNOT declare them in your Android Manifest! I’m not sure exactly why, but they must be registered in an IntentFilter in your JAVA code. And so, for this example we are going to have a receiver called ScreenReceiver, and I’m going to walk you through the differences between implementing it in a Service vs. in an Activity.

In Android, we will receive the broadcasted intents for screen lock & unlock. So inonCreate() method we have to set necessary action listeners. Also declare the necessary variables in the corresponding class.

//Declare the necessary variables

private BroadcastReceiver mReceiver;

//add the  below lines of code in to your onCreate() method,

//soon after calling super method.[i.e super.onCreate()]

IntentFilter filter = new IntentFilter(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_ON);

filter.addAction(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_OFF);

filter.addAction(Intent.ACTION_USER_PRESENT);

// Customized BroadcastReceiver class

//Will be defined soon..

mReceiver = new ScreenReceiver();

registerReceiver(mReceiver, filter);

FYI: We will receive Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_ON  action as soon screen is on. i.e It does not mean user has unlocked the screen.

Once we have set the actions which have to be listen to, we now have to define what should happen up on receiving corresponding action-intents. To  handle receivers we define a class which inherits BroadcastReceiver class.

public class ScreenReceiver extends BroadcastReceiver {

      @Override

      public void onReceive(Context context, Intent intent)

{

            if (intent.getAction().equals(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_OFF))

            {    

                  Log.v("$$$$$$", "In Method:  ACTION_SCREEN_OFF");

                  // onPause() will be called.

            }

            else if (intent.getAction().equals(Intent.ACTION_SCREEN_ON))

            {

                  Log.v("$$$$$$", "In Method:  ACTION_SCREEN_ON");

//onResume() will be called.

//Better check for whether the screen was already locked

// if locked, do not take any resuming action in onResume()

                  //Suggest you, not to take any resuming action here.       

            }

            else if(intent.getAction().equals(Intent.ACTION_USER_PRESENT))

            {

                  Log.v("$$$$$$", "In Method:  ACTION_USER_PRESENT");

//Handle resuming events

}

      }

Finally,  we have to unregister the action-intents         which ever we have set in onCreate() method. This should be done in onDestroy() of your Activity.

      @Override

      public void onDestroy()

      {

            super.onDestroy();

            Log.v("$$$$$$", "In Method: onDestroy()");

           

            if (mReceiver != null)

            {

                  unregisterReceiver(mReceiver);

                  mReceiver = null;

            }          

         

}

         One more important issue when screen locked is: our current Activity may be stopped forcefully by the system if it finds shortage of memory, instead of moving Activity to background. In such a case, we should have to save (all the necessary data) the current state of the Activity.

         In order to handle this, system will search for onSaveInstanceState() an overridden method before forcefully finishing the current Activity, and during the time of restore, it will call onRestoreInstanceState().

@Override

public void  onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState)

{

      Log.v("$````$", "In Method: onSaveInstanceState()");

      //if necessary,set a flag to check whether we have to restore or not

      //handle necessary savings…

}

@Override

public void onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle inState)

{

      Log.v("$````$", "In Method: onRestoreInstanceState()");

      //if any saved state, restore from it…

}

That’s it. Happy coding