Step #4: Sharing the Report

To actually share the report, we need to start an ACTION_SEND activity. ACTION_SEND is the implicit Intent action used for most of the “share” options that you see in Android apps. We can provide it with the Uri to the report, via an EXTRA_STREAM extra. Usually, a device will have 2+ apps that support ACTION_SEND for a text/html MIME type, so frequently the user will get a chooser, asking which of those apps to use. If the user has only one compatible app, or if the user chose a default share target on some past ACTION_SEND Intent, then there will be no chooser, and the user will be taken straight to some ACTION_SEND-supporting activity.

But, there is also the chance that there are zero apps that support ACTION_SEND for text/html. You might encounter this on an emulator, for example, which usually has few apps installed. So we need to handle this scenario as well, just as we did in the preceding tutorial, where we needed to handle the case where there was no ACTION_VIEW Intent for our content.

In RosterListFragment, add this shareReport() function:

  private fun shareReport(doc: Uri) {
    safeStartActivity(
      Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND)
        .setFlags(Intent.FLAG_GRANT_READ_URI_PERMISSION)
        .setType("text/html")
        .putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_STREAM, doc)
    )
  }

This is nearly identical to viewReport(). We create an ACTION_SEND Intent, tucking our Uri into the EXTRA_STREAM extra. We use setType() to indicate that this is HTML — this is needed due to the way that ACTION_SEND needs the Uri to be in an extra rather than in the main portion of the Intent the way our ACTION_VIEW Intent was set up.

Then, in onOptionsItemSelected(), add another branch to handle the share app bar item, routing it to shareReport() on our RosterMotor:

      R.id.share -> {
        motor.shareReport()
        return true
      }

Finally, in onViewCreated() of RosterListFragment, modify the navEvents collector configuration to look like:

    viewLifecycleOwner.lifecycleScope.launchWhenStarted {
      motor.navEvents.collect { nav ->
        when (nav) {
          is Nav.ViewReport -> viewReport(nav.doc)
          is Nav.ShareReport -> shareReport(nav.doc)
        }
      }
    }

Now, if you run the app and click the “share” action item, you should get some options for sharing the generated report.