How To Pass Data Between Two Different Activities Using Intent In Android

Intent are asynchronous message which allows Android components to request functionality from other components of the Android system

In this tutorial. I will demonstrate how to pass the data forward and back from one Activity to another using Android Explicit Intent.

To pass the data we need to use putExtra() which has two parameters first is key and second value.

putExtra() : adds the extended data to Intent.

intent.putExtra("key", value);

To retrieve data from Second Activity we need to use getIntent() and getExtra() methods which return the type of Bundle. Bundle is basically a mapping from String values to various Parcelable types

getIntent() : returns the Intent that started this Activity.

getExtra() : fetch the data which was added using putExtra() in the following way.

Bundle bundle = getIntent().getExtra();

Now you can use different Bundle class methods to get the values passed from the first Activity. Example :

bundle.getString("key")
bundle.getInt("key")
bundle.getDouble("key")

Passing Data Between Activities Example:

Passing Data Forward

diagram of passing data forward

Step1 :

activity_main.xml

MainActivity.java

Step 2 :

activity_second.xml

SecondActivity.java

Passing Data Back

diagram of passing data back

MainActivity

• Start the Second Activity with startActivityForResult, providing it an arbitrary result code.
• Override onActivityResult. This is called when the Second Activity finishes. You can make sure that it is actually the Second Activity by checking the result code. (This is useful when you are starting multiple different activities from the same main activity.)
• Extract the data you got from the return Intent. The data is extracted using a key-value pair.

Second Activity

• Put the data that you want to send back to the previous activity into an Intent. The data is stored in the Intent using a key-value pair.
• Set the result to RESULT_OK and add the intent holding your data.
• Call finish() to close the Second Activity.

Step 1 :

activity_main.xml

MainActivity.java

Step 2 :

activity_second.xml

SecondActivity.java

Now we are done with the coding part, so run the app and test it.