App Management Using AppManger

Overview

This guide will walk you through creating an EMDK For Android application that will use MX features introduced in EMDK for Android API to perform device configurations. MX represents a suite of Enterprise Features on top of standard, commercially available Android Open Source Project. So this tutorial will help configuring and managing device applications using the AppManager feature of EMDK Profiles.

Using this feature, a user can perform various App Management operations such as:

Install: - It allows you to install an android application with the user provided apk file location.
Uninstall: - This will remove the specified application from the device.
Upgrade: - This will upgrade/downgrade the specified application. The application must already exists on the device or you will receive an error (Use the Install parameter instead.
Default Launcher: - You can provide a different application launcher to enable. The launcher application must reside on the device already.
Enable and Disable Application: - Provide a package name of the applications that you want to enable or disable. Disabling an application will disable the ability to launch the application.
Clear App List: - It will clear the list of recent apps that you opened.
Manage Protected List: - You can manage which applications are on the protected list by adding and removing application from protected list.
Enable and Disable App Info: - The application info dialog shows detailed information about the application as well as allow you to perform actions like: Force Stop, Enable/Disable, Clear Data, Clear Cache. Specify the application's package name that you would like to enable or disable this feature for.

Note: Please refer the compatibility matrix to check availability these features across various symbol devices here.

Creating The Project

Note: Provide "EMDKMxAppManagerTutorial" as the project name for this tutorial.

Start by creating a new Android Studio project.

Adding The AppManager Profile Feature

Click here to see how to add a specific feature to the Profile Manager.
Provide "MxAppManagerProfile" as the Profile Name for this tutorial.

Note: You can provide any Profile Name but make sure to access it with the similar name in the Android code.
Now, you can see all these MX features on the left hand side of the Profile Editor window. Select the "App Manager" feature from the list and click "Right Arrow". Using this feature you can perform various operations in your apps on the Zebra Android device. These operations could be installing apps, uninstalling apps, upgrading apps etc. as mentioned in the beginning.
Provide name for this feature in order to modify this feature programmatically (Ex. AppManager). Now let us install an application using the install parameter of the app manager by providing the apk path and name of the application in the specified field. (For example: /storage/sdcard1/Herald.apk). Do not modify any action fields for this tutorial.

Note: The path of apk could be different on different devices.
Click Apply and Finish.
Click "Close".

Note:
Now the "EMDKConfig.xml" is created under "\assets" folder. This file will contain a definition of all of your profiles that you create.
You can inspect the EMDKConfig.xml to see it is reflecting the changes made to the parameters via EMDK Profile Manager GUI earlier. However, it is advised that this file not be manually updated and only be controlled via the Profile Manager. So you can see the entry of the install feature of App Manager and its path on SD card as parameter that we entered earlier in the profile creation.

Enabling Android Permissions

Modify the Application's Manifest.xml to use the EMDK library and to set permission for the EMDK.

You must first enable permissions for 'com.symbol.emdk.permission.EMDK':
```
<uses-permission android:name="com.symbol.emdk.permission.EMDK"/> 
```
Then you must enable the library:
```
<uses-library android:name="com.symbol.emdk"/>
```
When done, your manifest.xml should look like:

Adding Some Code

Now we will start to add some code.

First you must add references to the libraries:


import com.symbol.emdk.*;  
import com.symbol.emdk.EMDKManager.EMDKListener;  
import android.widget.Toast;

Then you must extend the activity to implement EMDKListener.


public class MainActivity extends Activity implements EMDKListener {  

.. .. .. .. .. .. ...  

@Override  
public void onClosed() {  
       // TODO Auto-generated method stub  
}  

@Override  
public void onOpened(EMDKManager emdkManager) {  
       // TODO Auto-generated method stub  
}  


}

We will now create some global variables to hold the profile name as well as instance objects of EMDKManager and ProfileManager with a status variable while applying the profile. Some of the variables are used to hold the name, type and description in case of any errors. These variables would be used throughout the code.


//Assign the profile name used in EMDKConfig.xml  
private String profileName = "MxAppManagerProfile";  

//Declare a variable to store ProfileManager object  
private ProfileManager profileManager = null;  

//Declare a variable to store EMDKManager object  
private EMDKManager emdkManager = null;

// Contains the parm-error name (sub-feature that has error)
private String errorName = "";

// Contains the characteristic-error type (Root feature that has error)
private String errorType = "";

// contains the error description for parm or characteristic error.
private String errorDescription = "";

// contains status of the profile operation
private String status = "";

In the onCreate method, we call getEMDKManager so that the EMDK can be initialized and checked to see if it is ready.


//The EMDKManager object will be created and returned in the callback.  
EMDKResults results = EMDKManager.getEMDKManager(getApplicationContext(), this);  

//Check the return status of getEMDKManager  
if (results.statusCode == EMDKResults.STATUS_CODE.SUCCESS) {

// EMDKManager object creation success


} else {

// EMDKManager object creation failed


}

So far your code should look like:

Now we need to use the onOpened method to get a reference to the EMDKManager. The EMDKListener interface will trigger this event when the EMDK is ready to be used. This must be implemented in order to get a reference to the EMDKManager APIs. This event will pass the EMDKManager instance and we assign it to the global variable emdkManager that we created in the previous steps. We then use that instance object to get an instance of ProfileManager and assign it to the global variable profileManager. This is how we will interface with the APIs in the rest of the code:


this.emdkManager = emdkManager;

// Get the ProfileManager object to process the profiles
profileManager = (ProfileManager) emdkManager
        .getInstance(EMDKManager.FEATURE_TYPE.PROFILE);

Now that we have a reference to ProfleManager, we use it to install and activate the profile we built earlier using the processProfile method. We could have also performed this action at a different time, say when someone pressed a button, but we chose to do it as soon as the EMDK was ready:


if (profileManager != null) {
    String[] modifyData = new String[1];

// Call processPrfoile with profile name and SET flag to create the profile. The modifyData can be null.
EMDKResults results = profileManager.processProfile(profileName,
        ProfileManager.PROFILE_FLAG.SET, modifyData);

if (results.statusCode == EMDKResults.STATUS_CODE.CHECK_XML) {


} else {
  // Show dialog of Failure
    AlertDialog.Builder builder = new AlertDialog.Builder(this);
    builder.setTitle("Failure");
    builder.setMessage("Failed to apply profile...")
            .setPositiveButton("OK",
                    new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
                        public void onClick                                                 (DialogInterface dialog,
                                int id) {

                        }
                    });
    AlertDialog alert = builder.create();
    alert.show();
}


}

This processProfile method returns the result of applying a particular profile that we set using EMDK Profile Wizard in EMDKResults reference. If the profile is successfully processed, it retuns the status as CHECK_XML and then we go on and parse the response to get further details whether the profile was applied successfully or not. Otherwise we display a Failure message in a dialog.

Note: 1. There is a difference between processing a profile successfully and applying a profile successfully.

Note: 2. If the status is other than CHECK_XML, we are simply displaying a failure message. You can actually go ahead and check different types of status and display the appropriate message accordingly, which is not in the scope of this sample tutorial.

In case of CHECK_XML status, We retrieve XML response string from the result using getStatusString method.


// Get XML response as a String
String statusXMLResponse = results.getStatusString();

Further, we would parse this XML response string using XML Pull Parser in order to get the status and error parameters if any. XML Pull Parser is an interface that defines parsing functionality provided in XMLPULL V1 API (visit this website to learn more about API and its implementations). In the parsing we would be looking for specific status tags (Error Name, Error Type and Error Description) in case of any errors and if found, we would get those values in the respective global variables that we have declared in previous step.


try {
    // Create instance of XML Pull Parser to parse the response
    XmlPullParser parser = Xml.newPullParser();
    // Provide the string response to the String Reader that reads
    // for the parser
    parser.setInput(new StringReader(statusXMLResponse));
    // Call method to parse the response
    parseXML(parser);
    } catch (XmlPullParserException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

Note: Here we have called the method parseXML to parse XML response string. We will declare the method in the next step.

Once the response is parsed, we would display the result of applying this profile in a dialog by calling displayResults method, which we would declare in coming steps.


// Method call to display results in a dialog
displayResults();

Your complete onOpened method should now look like:

You will see few errors as we have not declared the respective methods to parse the response and display result. Lets do it one by one. In this step, we will create a method parseXML that uses XML Pull Parser to parse the XML string response and set the status and error parameters if any.

In the reponse, we are supposed to capture name and desc for parm-error tag, type and desc for characteristic-error tag in case of any errors.


// Method to parse the XML response using XML Pull Parser
public void parseXML(XmlPullParser myParser) {
int event;
try {
    event = myParser.getEventType();
    while (event != XmlPullParser.END_DOCUMENT) {
        String name = myParser.getName();
        switch (event) {
        case XmlPullParser.START_TAG:
            // Get Status, error name and description in case of
            // parm-error
            if (name.equals("parm-error")) {
                status = "Failure";
                errorName = myParser.getAttributeValue(null, "name");
                errorDescription = myParser.getAttributeValue(null,
                        "desc");

            // Get Status, error type and description in case of
            // parm-error
        } else if (name.equals("characteristic-error")) {
            status = "Failure";
            errorType = myParser.getAttributeValue(null, "type");
            errorDescription = myParser.getAttributeValue(null,
                    "desc");
        }
        break;
    case XmlPullParser.END_TAG:

        break;
    }
    event = myParser.next();

  }
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}


}

Your complete parseXML method should now look like:

You will still see one error as we need to declare displayResults method to display the result of profile operation in a dialog. Before displaying the results, we should form the content of the result to be shown first, specifically in case of errors. This could be done by creating buildFailureMessage method.

In this method, the error message in case of error is formed using following way:
- Name and description of error if the response contains parm-error.
- Type and description of error if the response contains characteristic-error.
- Name, type and description of error if the response contains both parm-error and characteristic-error.
The buildFailureMessage method would have following code to match the above mentioned criteria.
```
// Method to build failure message that contains name, type and
// description of respective error (parm, characteristic or both)
public String buildFailureMessage() {
  String failureMessage = "";
  if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(errorName) && !TextUtils.isEmpty(errorType))
     failureMessage = errorName + " :" + "\n" + errorType + " :" + "\n"
            + errorDescription;
  else if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(errorName))
     failureMessage = errorName + " :" + "\n" + errorDescription;
  else
     failureMessage = errorType + " :" + "\n" + errorDescription;
  return failureMessage;

}
```
buildFailureMessage method should look like:

In this step, we will add displayResults method to display the result of profile operation in a dialog. The dialog would display status as Success or Failure with corresponding message based on the response of profile operation.


// Method to display results (Status, Error Name, Error Type, Error
// Description) in a
// dialog
public void displayResults() {
  // Alert Dialog to display the status of the Profile creation
  // operation of MX features
  AlertDialog.Builder alertDialogBuilder = new AlertDialog.Builder(
        MainActivity.this);

  if (TextUtils.isEmpty(errorDescription)) {
    alertDialogBuilder.setTitle("Success");
    alertDialogBuilder.setMessage("Profile Successfully Applied...");
  } else {
    // set title
    alertDialogBuilder.setTitle(status);
    // call buildFailureMessage() method to set failure message in
    // dialog
    alertDialogBuilder.setMessage(buildFailureMessage());
  }

  alertDialogBuilder.setCancelable(false).setPositiveButton("OK",
        new DialogInterface.OnClickListener() {
            public void onClick(DialogInterface dialog, int id) {
            }
        });
  // create alert dialog
  AlertDialog alertDialog = alertDialogBuilder.create();

  // show it
  alertDialog.show();

}

The method displayResults should look like:

You can see that all the errors are gone.

Now let's override the "onDestroy" method so we can release the EMDKManager resources:


@Override  
protected void onDestroy() {  
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub  
    super.onDestroy();  
    //Clean up the objects created by EMDK manager  
    emdkManager.release();  
}

Your onDestroy method should now look like this:

Running the Application

That's it, We are done with the configurations and coding. Now let's run the application.
Connect the device to a USB port. The Herald application is not present on the device before running this application.

Note: Make sure the device has USB debugging enabled.
Run the application. The app displays a Toast with a success message.
You can see that the Herald app has now been installed on the device whose apk path we had provided earlier during profile creation.
Similarly we can leverage the other features (uninstall, upgrade, set as default launcher) of the App Manager by setting appropriate parameters while creating the profile.

Important Programming Tips

It is required to do the following changes in the application's AndroidManifest.xml:
Note:
- Include the permission for EMDK:
```
<uses-permission android:name="com.symbol.emdk.permission.EMDK"/>
```
Note:
- Use the EMDK library:
```
<uses-library android:name="com.symbol.emdk"/>
```
Use the DataWedge v1.7.12 or higher version to test the ProfileManager.processProfile() for DataWedge profiles.

What's Next

Now that you have learned how to configure applications in the device using MX App Manager feature, let us try some configuring some of the other MX feature through profile creation. So in the next tutorial, we will concentrate on the "Power Manager" feature and try to explore this feature by creating a tutorial.