Android Tutorial

By : Ketan Bhimani

416 

Expanded status bar showing the icon, both text fields, and

the time of the notification.

Updating Notifications

You don’t want your application’s notifications piling up in the

notification bar. Therefore, you might want to reuse or update

notifications to keep the notification list manageable. For example,

there is no reason to keep a notification informing the user that the

application is downloading File X when you now want to send

another notification saying File X has finished downloading.

Instead, you can simply update the first notification with new

information.

When the notification identifiers match, the old notification is

updated. When a notification with matching identifier is posted, the

ticker text does not draw a second time. To show the user that

something has changed, you can use a counter. The value of the

number member variable of the Notification object tracks and

displays this. For instance, we can set it to the number 4, as shown

here: notify.number = 4;