Using Android Intent object in Kotlin

An Intent is an object of Android application development that’s used for representing an Android application intent to perform an action.

You can use intents for many performing many kinds of actions, such as opening a website or moving from one Android Activity to the next.

There are two kinds of Intent in Android:

• Explicit Intent is an intent that is fulfilled within the application that runs it.
• Implicit Intent sends a request to the Android system to fulfill the intended action. It’s up to Android how to respond to the request

This tutorial will help you run both types of Intent when developing an Android application with Kotlin.

There’s also a companion Android project that demonstrates how to create both types of Intent in this GitHub repo. You can import the project to Android Studio.

Creating explicit Kotlin Intent

To create an explicit Intent, you need to pass a Context and a Class to the constructor.

For example, the following Kotlin code creates an intent that takes the current activity this as the Context argument and the SecondActivity class as the Class argument:

intent = Intent(this, SecondActivity::class.java)
startActivity(intent)

In Kotlin, the SecondActivity class is directly initialized using the ::class.java syntax.

Then, the intent is passed to the startActivity() function so that a new activity will be launched by Android.

In the example application, you can press the Go to second activity button to see an explicit Intent in action:

The code for the explicit intent can be found at the MainActivity.kt file at lines 14 to 20.

Now that you’ve seen an example of an explicit Intent, let’s see an example of an implicit Intent next.

Creating implicit Kotlin Intent

An implicit Intent can be created by specifying two arguments in the Intent constructor:

• The Intent action that you want Android to perform. There are a limited set of actions provided by Android that you can use
• The data to operate on, expressed as a Uri value

For example, suppose you want your Android app to open a web browser and navigate to a certain URL.

This is how you can create the Intent object:

intent = Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW, Uri.parse("https://metapx.org"))
startActivity(intent)

The above code states that you want to perform an intended action called ACTION_VIEW and use the parsed URL address https://metapx.org as the Uri data.

The Android system will try to fulfill this request as best as it can.

In the example Android app, you can press the Launch Browser button to see an implicit Intent in action:

The code for the implicit intent can be found at the MainActivity.kt file at lines 22 to 28.

By providing a web address as the Uri data value, Android will open your default browser and switch the active application to that browser.

The browser will also navigate to the provided URL automatically.

Now you’ve learned how to create an Android Intent object in Kotlin. Good work! 👍