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Build an Interactive Story App

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Finishing an Activity

2:40 with Ben Jakuben

First, let's take a look at how to properly finish an Activity to return to the original Activity that started it. Then we can talk about how to handle a user's name when a story is restarted.

  • finish() - The Activity method to finish an Activity and return to the Activity that started it.

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    All right, so how are we going to get back to the start of our app? 0:00
    Let's add a new OnClickListener for this play_again_button. 0:03
    And then we can explore our options. 0:06
    So choice2Button.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener), and there we go. 0:09
    Now, to get back to MainActivity, 0:16
    we could use a brand new intent, just like we've seen before. 0:18
    Except this time, it would be going the other way. 0:21
    We would be starting the MainActivity from our StoryActivity, 0:23
    and it would technically work, but it would actually be adding a new activity on 0:26
    something behind the scenes called our navigation stack, or back stack. 0:30
    More on that in just a moment. 0:34
    We actually all ready have a relationship with MainActivity here. 0:35
    We started StoryActivity from MainActivity. 0:38
    So, that means we can go back to it with a very simple activity method. 0:40
    We can call finish here, which will finish the current activity and get rid of it, 0:43
    taking us back to the existing MainActivity, 0:47
    which might even still be in memory from before. 0:50
    Okay, so we come in here, add a new name, start the adventure and 0:55
    navigate all the way to the end of the story. 1:00
    And if we hit Play Again, it goes back to beginning. 1:03
    Cool, all right. 1:06
    So, this works well but I'd like to improve it slightly and 1:06
    make our app navigation a little more robust. 1:09
    When a user taps on Play Again, do we want to restart the story with the same name or 1:12
    do we wanna go all the way to beginning and have the user enter a new name? 1:16
    We could do both. 1:20
    Let's change this to have the play again button restart the story with 1:21
    the same name at page zero. 1:24
    And then in the next video, we can talk briefly about Android app navigation and 1:26
    how to get all way back to the MainActivity in a different way. 1:30
    So, to restart the story, all we need to do is load page zero again. 1:33
    We can delete this finish line, or comment out if you wanna save it for reference. 1:37
    And then type loadPage(0). 1:41
    We could test this, but we're going to have a problem. 1:44
    Can you guess what it is? 1:47
    All right, let's take a look. 1:48
    All right, so we'll do the story, go through to the end, 1:52
    click on Play Again, and look at that, we have a missing button. 1:56
    It's still invisible. 2:00
    Okay, this is an easy fix. 2:02
    We can just make sure our buttons are visible each time we load them. 2:04
    So, here in our fancy new loadButtons method, let's add a line at the top. 2:07
    Choice1Button.setVisibility, and 2:12
    we'll just set it to View.VISIBLE each time through. 2:16
    And we can do the same thing for choice2, choice2Button.setVisibility, View.VISIBLE. 2:20
    Let's just make sure this is working. 2:28
    Okay, start the adventure. 2:32
    Go to the end, Play Again. 2:34
    And now we have two buttons working, very cool. 2:36

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