Book Excerpt: Floating Action Mode and ACTION_PROCESS_TEXT

The following is an excerpt from Version 6.8 of “The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development”:

On Android 6.0, if you highlight text, you will see a new floating action mode, where cut, copy, and paste operations reside:

If you tap that overflow indicator on the action mode, a fly-out menu will appear… one that contains arbitrary apps, in addition to system-supplied options:

In this case, the MNC “API Demos” app appears as an option. Choosing it pops up an activity that has access to the highlighted text from the preceding activity:

Replacing the value in the field and clicking the button puts your replacement text in as a replacement for whatever you had highlighted.

The “API Demos” activity in question, that is receiving the text, supports ACTION_PROCESS_TEXT as the Intent action:

<intent-filter >
    <action android:name="android.intent.action.PROCESS_TEXT"/>
    <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
    <data android:mimeType="text/plain" />
</intent-filter>

Note that this <intent-filter> also limits the MIME type to be text/plain, though it is unclear if there are any other valid options for that MIME type.

EXTRA_PROCESS_TEXT will hold some text, or EXTRA_PROCESS_TEXT_READONLY will hold it if the text is read-only. The activity will be invoked via startActivityForResult(). The result Intent can have its own EXTRA_PROCESS_TEXT value, which will be the replacement text.